Turmoil: how cowboys pumped oil

In the context of the Wild West, the pursuit of valuable minerals almost always means a gold rush. But gold can also be black, and it was quite hunted by dashing cowboys in their dashing cowboy hats. They also combined debit with credit, caused local environmental disasters, and used vines and moles for geological exploration. At least that’s the case in the Turmoil game: a casual economic strategy game where the player has to become an oil tycoon.

In general, the topic of the extraction of “Texas tea” is not something that would be strongly heard. My first association with finding crude oil in the United States is the Looney Tunes black–and-white cartoon about Porky Pig and Gabby Goat. By the way, this was the last appearance of this character in classic cartoons. And why did they dislike the goat? Well, Norco also raised the topic of environmental disasters from the extraction of rock oil and other fossil resources, and in the Landman series the plot revolves around the fact that “eternity smells of oil,” well, that’s about it. So the topic cannot be called hackneyed.

I have a clear feeling that Turmoil has desktop roots. I haven’t found any clear evidence for this, but there’s too much evidence.: This includes a fixed number of “players” who follow the same rules as a live player, a spartan appearance, and an emphasis on balancing game mechanics. We will analyze them in detail now.

The Capitalist Dream

So, starting the campaign, we participate in a land auction with other players, of whom there are three more. By renting a plot of land for a year at a price of only 2,000 evergreens, we take a similar amount of cash and set off to develop the deposit.

Next comes a simplified economic strategy (although here it is more of an economic tactic) of indirect management, in which we have to fulfill the main task: to earn as much as possible. Yes, that’s right. It is impossible to find and extract all the oil, not to build the most efficient and safe deposit. Our goal is money and only money. This is an important difference from older brothers like Frostpunk, where the main goal is survival.

At each level, we have two companies, succinctly named Left and Right, like Twix sticks. Both of them are buying crude oil, the price of which is jumping in real time. Depending on the price, the player needs to decide where and how much to send carts with barrels of oil. Horse-drawn, because they love horses in Texas, and the mass use of internal combustion engines is still far away. It is also not necessary to sell all this oil immediately. You can drain it into pre-built tanks in anticipation of a more interesting price being offered on the market. But it’s worth remembering that carelessness is the mother of disasters, and an unopened valve is the father of an oil spill, for which a huge fine is due. The valve doesn’t close for free either, by the way.

The exploration in the game is even more tricky. Oil is stored here in underground reservoirs, hidden from us by a curtain of soil consisting of vector triangles. Even more grotesque is the search for these same oil basins, may the gods of geology forgive me. First, we can launch a dowser, which will show us where to drill vertically downwards. There are alternative, but even more cartoonish methods. You can use a scientist’s mole to make random triangles visible. You can also use the “scanner”, which will open the triangles already selected by the player.

All these and other methods and features can be upgraded in the city during the land auction. There are quite a lot of chips, but you have to choose wisely: there will never be a lot of money, and sometimes there may not be any at all. In this case, the bank will kindly provide a loan at a favorable interest rate.

Due to a lot of these nuances, the game becomes very variable, interesting and gambling, something like a virtual Monopoly. But let’s pay attention to the elephant stuck in this oil swamp.

Style and lack of style

Yes, this game looks poor. Visually, it is associated with a “browser” or a mobile phone, which does not cost time and money. If everything still looks good in statics, then animations are literally eighth grade computer science homework. It’s perfectly executed, of course, but children’s drawings are interesting only to the parents of these children and teachers.

It’s all about the lack of style. Everything is not serious enough, not funny enough, too detailed for minimalism, and overly minimalistic for anything else. The characters of the players are especially annoying in this context: the wretched-looking vector faces give out such cliched phrases that they literally frighten with their unnaturalness. The ominous valley, as it is.

The last nail in the coffin of aesthetics is hammered by Russian localization. No, the translation is quite high-quality. It’s about the Cyrillic font, which is not stylized in any way, unlike the original. If this wasn’t a big problem in the same Last Report, where it was a fly in the ointment, then everything is very sad here. By God, it’s like this game wasn’t released in steam and epic, but in VK and Odnoklassniki. And about 20 years ago. Hello to the Prison and the Merry Farm.

The sound is generally not bad, but it’s not remarkable either. The soundtrack is based on pleasant country guitar beats, stock sound effects, well-chosen, but very bland.

As a result, I personally had to compromise every time I run this game: is such a poor-looking game worth the time if only its basic filling is good? It seems that the correct answer of well-bred gentlemen is strictly positive. Graphophile is the worst, isn’t he?

But now imagine that you don’t have a necronote, or a PC built in 2007 that can never be returned, but an animal with a video card sparkling in the dark with a dozen coolers at the price of a not very rusty 21 Volga on the go, and there’s not a lot of free time – everything is not so obvious anymore. Style, in my opinion, is above technique. Thanks to him, Norco and Blood West look great. And if in Cloudpunk you had to struggle with the feeling that you were playing Minecraft with your kids, then here you get an association with the leisure time of office workers of pre-retirement age. Well, like solitaire “Klondike Solitaire”.

Although there are a couple of ways to refine her appearance. I am sure that the game would look great on a CRT monitor, necessarily rounded so that the picture bends. Or on another device altogether…

The Pocket Tycoon

When searching for information about the game, I did not find its desktop ancestor, which most likely does not exist. But I found her mobile version for android. And, there’s a saying about copper and gold. Because the pocket version can be forgiven for a lot, especially the visual one. It’s easier to find a needle in a haystack than a good mobile game.

In this form, Turmoil feels great. Comprehensive, unobtrusive, meaningful gameplay is great for killing time en masse. It’s very productive, because it’s more like an electronic version of a board game, like, for example, Star Realms, rather than three in a row. The brain is very actively involved.

There are other problems with the mobile version: it’s harder to buy, and you don’t always want to enjoy ads. The version treated with a pill for greed does not have access to online and cross-platform saves. However, this is not always a disadvantage.

Another small thing is that the PC and Android versions play very differently. It’s about time management, which is typical for such games. To speed up the passage of time in this game, you need to keep the speed up button pressed all the time. I think it’s clear that it’s much more convenient to do this on the keyboard. Thus, the identical gameplay in different versions tends towards different styles. If you want to directly mine fields on a PC (you can walk a year in about five minutes, the main thing is to keep track of prices), leaning more towards the strategic side, as if these are Heroes of Might and Magic or Total War, then on a phone or tablet screen it’s just more pleasant to watch horses carrying barrels of oil, which is humbly pumped out of the bowels.Perfect to pass the time in line.

In this spirit, I suggest that we all celebrate the recent Oilman’s Day. Closing one eye, the game is still very entertaining and exciting, so I strongly recommend that you come to a compromise between beauty and fun, and have a good time. I find myself thinking that for me personally, this game is a kind of Guilty Pleasure. She’s too sticky. I’m tempted to open it for at least five or ten minutes, at least for one “skating rink”. And where there is one, there are two and three… Anyway, it’s quite an exciting activity, and good entrepreneurs aren’t fixated on aesthetics. Make money, partner, the rest is rubbish.