Playtime: 9h19m (completed campaign on normal difficulty)

Intro

Turmoil is a construction game in which you build refineries and silos above ground, and a network of pipes below ground. Each turn/year you buy upgrades, bribe people in the saloon, and bid on deeds against your competitors. Then you explore this deed by yourself, hoping you got something good. The ultimate goal is becoming major by winning enough auctions for % of stake in the town.

The Good

• Quick games.
• Easy to learn, except for the weird way gas works.
• It's relaxing and charming.
• Normal difficulty seems fairly easy.

The Bad

• Normal difficulty seems maybe a bit too easy.
• Gas works in a bizarre way - you can't sell it, it drives up the price of oil? Huh?
• The scanner automatically increasing its area is really clunky.
• You can't take actions while paused.
• You have to finish the campaign before you can pick characters with traits.
• With no manual saves i can imagine someone getting unlucky early on and never being able to recover because a bad start makes the rest of the game harder.

Conclusion

Turmoil is a nice little game that could've been better with a couple of tweaks but is overall still worth playing.

Screenshots because i always forget to add those:

The final year was rough for the AI:

I made 2 million from selling 1,7 million barrels of oil. Take that, environment!

I think it's safe for me to say that this game is easy, because I usually suck at strategy games but beat Turmoil's campaign on my first try. I didn't try "expert" mode.

Pros

• Beautiful, clear visuals
• Easy to learn the basics
• Lots of upgrades
• Short play sessions are possible
• Land and stock auctions give a bit more depth to gameplay

Cons

• "Mayor tips" are nice, but still some mechanics need a proper tutorial. I finished the game but don't know how those moles work or how to use gas to raise oil prices. Levels are way too short to experiment so I didn't bother with trying new and risky strategies.
• Upgrade system doesn't make much sense to me. Let's say you buy a pipe upgrade which makes pipes thicker so they can transfer more oil. However, it doesn't give you new pipes automatically. Every level, you have to click each pipe to upgrade them which is easy to miss and not clearly explained. Same for horse upgrades. I bought a few of them and thought my horses would be "better" automatically but no. Each level, you still start with basic horses and you have to pay some amount to upgrade them.