Turmoil (2016)

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!

It's a rather fun indie strategy game; a simplistic rags-to-riches playthrough with room to adapt your strategies in random-generated maps for oil drilling. I soon realize how 20 minutes can just fly by for each round, trying to make the most of the resources you handle and the natural ones you extract. Upgrade features encourage deciding your approach, and you'll have options to pick extra benefits through citizens' offers.

Now that I cleared through 3/4 of terrains in a campaign run, I feel quite done throwing in 7 hours on the playthrough with its original game mechanics. In a singleplayer, the novelty wears down soon enough and that's where multiplayer comes in to pit your efficiency against each others. Easy to learn along with some strategic depth thrown in, but expect no story to hang around on.

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.

A small game about drilling oil. Simply flash game-like levels where you try to find and pump up all the oil out of a piece of land, competing with three other oil barons. One level takes maybe five minutes to play. The super bitesize levels kept me booting up this game whenever I was too busy to commit more time than that. I finished the entire thing!

Good flash game.