Disclaimer: this review is long, contains spoilers and is possibly a bit offensive/irreverent/bad humor. Why, it also contains lies.

However, it wasn't written under the influence of any illegal substances. I assure you, officer.

The following review is restricted For Educational purposes. Not for recreational use.

After playing Florida Simulator 1986 I figured i was doomed to another bomb checking this out. But DDS was a pleasant surprise. It's a unique simulation game that is inspired and takes the old Dope Wars concept to the next level, that of a fully fledged first person simulation type experience. It also integrates (Amongst other things) a constant stealth game/sneak dynamic and crafting of the substances themselves in a Skyrim-ified workshop like manner with object-placement. The final result is a mix of different elements that provide for scratching a few itches: that of a a business management type sim (one in which you scale into wealth and greed), with crafting and stealth? Hybrid recipe for success!

I have the brains, you have the brawn, lets make the deal and then get gone!

Gameplay of the game consists mostly of checking your laptop to see what your customers want, and then preparing for the 'workday' by ordering it in and then collecting the shipment later when it arrives, from there the bulk of the gameplay emerges: dividing up the stash and cutting it/mixing it, preparing it and preparing to distribute it in your pipeline. It's quite a bit of work, as there a lot of logistical considerations, such as quantity, time, location, allocation of all these things.

Patty Cake Patty Cake Bakers Man! Make that money as fast as you can!

Throughout the day you can also go down to the 7-11 or drug store to get ingredients like baking soda, bottled water, and sugar, which you are going to be using to cut substances and experiment with to enhance effects in 'that special batch'.

THAT SPECIAL BATCH:

The real fun in this game for me was experimenting with batches and the various lab equipment you can purchase. It is the 'gold' idea this game makes available. Running batches allows you to essentially make a whole lot of cash by stretching your limited supply of legitimate substances and mixing them down into such a way that you can stretch the effects of them while earning more because the whole sale is based on total weight. This turns the managerial aspects of this game into a kind of 'efficiency' game where you use your greed to experiment and really try to get the most bang for your buck. It also (somewhat) lets you experiment on your customers to see how the game works (you can generate addicts or kill people if your substances are too toxic, or they wise up to the fact of what you are doing and know you are ripping them off)

Unfortunately the batching feature is also where the main problems with the game start to crop up and limit the payoff on an otherwise unique and really fun idea.

I hope you are a grizzled Skyrim junky who doesn't fear hours and hours of digging around through lists in containers, wait until you see the sliders in DDS!

It's very janky and lackluster UI which is but only barely serviceable. (the devs had great ideas but what would seem to be limited by their lack of skill as well as a minimal amount of balance, though there is definitely a decent enough balance that i can tell, things could just have gone much further)

Another problem with the game is you make too much money too quickly and run out of stuff to do with it. so you just buy more drugs and lab equipment. The game needs 'toys' like fast cars guns and a swimming pool full of lascivious gender-people or something

As you accumulate cash, you have to find ways to conceal and store it (furthering your logistical challenges and daily workload). You can call up your friendly local neighborhood money launderer (who collects almost half of it), but collecting it all and getting it stuffed in suitcases is another logistical chore. You can buy real estate, but it wont be long until you have more empty houses than you'll ever have a reason to ever visit. That's probably when you'll quit playing DDS. (If you are sane that is.)

Nooooo not yet daddy, just one more batch! I know let's make some JET and leave our calling card at the police station

ISSUES:

BUGS: Overall, this game is quite bug laden. a lot of the worst ones have been corrected over time but there are some terrible ones that will show up. i spent an hour trying to talk to an NPC during the main quest who wants me to sit down with him in a night club and it took me forever to figure out how to get past it, and once i did i kept getting busted before i could save on my way back into town from the night club area. another time i bought a bunch of lab equipment and had it sent to my place and ooof, it never showed up. Sometimes in suitcases things will momentarily 'disappear' But I never actually lost stuff that I know of.

In any case SAVE OFTEN AND USE multiple Slots!

JANK: a lot of janky stuff here and there, particularly with the UI and with mixing. It's really easy to make mistakes where you ruin batches. Leave something in a flask and come back later to dump more shit in thinking it's empty? Congrats. You wasted $3,000 mats and gotta order more! Forget what went into that batch? Not even sure what substance it is? Maybe it's the safe stuff? Maybe it's experimental!? Just made 5000 1 gram packets oc stasy and realized it was the wrong thing and not in pill form so people wont want it? Time to go back to put it back in a big jar one packet at a time? groan. Lots of things like this are the main issues with the game and it's biggest flaw. But it's no biggie. You'll do it once and you'll learn from your mistake.

Remember the disclaimer?

BALANCE/DESIGN: The game isn't that balanced or tested. It's okay, but there is lots of things to do that would improve it and they just let it go by the wayside and called it a day. One thing that sucks is you will phase out low level substances fast. Marijuana gets obsolete pretty quickly and you later unlock ways to grow it even for next to nothing (for some reason) but at that point it's not really worth messing with. I imagine a lot of people wanted (or were excited) by the idea of growing your own plants (you know who you are!) so they added it into the game. Similarly, some other drugs have some interesting recipes you can do with them (ecstasy) but they don't really yield the kind of money that makes messing with them worth it, and getting too clever with things usually isn't really worth the time and effort. For example, you can produce some very nice pills in VERY HUGE quantities that have everything from amphetamine, heroin, meth and more but because those things cost a bit more than the underlying or ultimately eat into profits, it's cost-prohibitive to do, its far easier just to get people 'hooked' on harder substances and focus on those things and you can just ignore the lower tiers and only focus on later tier ones... I dislike this because it would be cool to upgrade a substance this way (and the game is really half-way built for this in mind it would seem because of what you unlock as you play it) but the game doesn't fully/properly integrate a way to actually make it so that you can design such 'better drugs' (in terms of the STRENGTH of the substance which goes up a lot) translate into higher prices. Your customers will like what you make and you can then make the prices go up, but not by that much, certainly not to the extent that it's worthwhile when you can just spend the whole game smuggling cocaine.

This 'better drug design' opportunity which was missed is especially true for marijuana, as you can do some really neat things with marijuana down the road with your lab equipment. When you grow your own plants you wind up with more material than you know what to do with. so what i and other players learned was you can use it as a filler material that increases all other stats. This would seem intentional as it actually has incredible stats, and since it is basically free for you to grow, that helps it so you dont have to go to the gas station any more to get things like baking soda, sugar, etc as it tends to have better stats than any of those things which you might choose to use as a filler.

However actually going about this, takes a lot of time. you have to grow the plants, process it and go through so many steps. It takes less time to go back to the 7-11, the extra effort to get some higher quality substance doesnt seem to really matter that much. The game took the time to provide the means to do it, and it just doesnt balance out in the end. lol.

You can also do things change the forms of substances from powders, to liquids to crystals... and with mary-jane, you can dehydrate and crystalize your produce and store it in different forms, some for mixing some for retail, However, as far as I can tell, you dont get stat changes by doing this (you cannot upgrade a substance based on form) And nobody wants THC crystals. The game also does not support any methods or 'potentifying' THC-substances which is pretty short-sighted and disappointing. I can see this being a bit overcomplicated if done the wrong way, but I still think this was a major oversight because they they could have made it so old things scale late game allowing you to upgrade substances based on your utilization of lab equipment instead of just randomly mixing up batches dumping things into a mixer not knowing what does what unless you use a guide or rely on your own notes outside of the game.

Oh, you also have this bullshitty RPG skill system that lets you run faster and be a bit more sneaky, but it doesnt really seem to do hardly anything.

While this game gets really repetitive and is literally a kind of glorified 'take your daughter to work day' (that's assuming your daddy is a crack dealer) type walking simulator, in the end this game suffers the most from the UI, I feel. As you are dickering with your substances and lab equipment a lot of things are not that user friendly in addition to a lot of funky little bits involving moving things back and forth. It makes it many times easier to screw something up unintentionally when mixing wrong things together, or just causing you to waste more time than necessary. when you mix things you will very easily lose track of what went into the mix. you get the chance to label things once and if you label it wrong or forget whats in it? well thats too bad. you can even label substances wrong calling 'cocaine' 'meth' or something and if you do you cannot rename it or have a clue what was even in it. powdered substances look the same. It's an easy mistake to make when you change form, or you have a sloppy and not-well planned naming designation system. To make this worse, you can even sell a customer the wrong thing as long as it has literally any bit of the substance they want in it. Doh.

A lot of these aspects are the kinds of things a unskilled developer wont be able to fix, but some of them could be, so it seems that they just opted to not develop it further (hence three stars)

The other issue with the UI is it's not possible to know how to go about mixing without a guide. Almost everything in this game is hidden and requires you to experiment to figure things out... It's not rocket science or complicated, but its not that intuitive either. But it doesn't really provide and kind of system to learn on or from. I discovered this pretty quickly when i tried mixing baking soda with cocaine thinking i could make crack that way (because thats how it is in the real world y0) but the game isn't realistic in any sense. mixing rules have hidden properties that aren't really intuitive. kind of a flawed approach.

Still, In the beginning I liked that approach (of having to experiment to learn the arbitrary laws of chemistry in DDS) but at some point it becomes impossible to learn (or master) without just looking things up. Indeed, as you try, learning is tedious on your own as there is no real way to keep track of things or learn from your endeavors unless you write it all down outside the game. there isnt even a notes function in game (which would only slightly help, but a journal of what went into batches would have been a god-send, similar to what is in Russian Fishing Simulator when you sell off a haul when coming to port, for example as a away to track your profits and market conditions) And even if you had these things, you would not know the effects of reagants or how the in-game chemistry works... These things are not hinted at in any form whatsoever. It's a lot to ask of a player to experiment and figure the game out. Cooking up a batch of stuff blind, not really knowing what i was doing and then seeing people get mad at me or dieing from it, wasn't fun for long..

USING THE CALC/TOOL/GUIDE: and here we are. lol. DDS is one of those games that you simultaneously will want to have something up on another monitor: a wiki, a guide or a nice little batch recipe caclulator that tells you exactly how one thing differs from the next. I wont link to it, but you wont have trouble finding it if you get sucked into the world of DDS and begin to look. :)

I'm in the camp this is not a good design/route for any game, and in this case, there isn't ultimately any reason for it. All of these things could have technically been in the game and integrated into the UI. When mixing a batch it could SHOW you or at least hint at what the results might be. But that was never integrated (it would be a lot of work)

Perhaps there wiill be a DDS 2 or GTA 6 or other large-world/open world type game that will natively have this little idea in their games with a proper UI. IT very much feels like a fallout 4 mod that just grew it's own legs to run with the idea by slapping on this game as the body. dabbling around with the mixing isnt that different from a lot of the crafting mods you see in Skyrim/Fallout and it reminded me quite a bit of the reloading bench from NV.

In conclusion DDS is a mix of things good and bad. But it's a unique idea for a game that nobody asked for or wanted but simultaneously surprising it hasnt been done in this fashion. It is strangely fun and satisfying to tweak new recipes and amasss a wealth of virtual substances in your warehouse. While most simulators and management games that are 'business oriented' it seems few really actually scale and play the way this one does. For me, this is what really wins me over. Most things i've played more or less give you a world or an engine or some kind of 'toy' to play around with and pick and poke in a certain way and it burps out points (means yer winning son!) Things are a bit different in DDS in the sense that its very open in a more diversified and real manner consisting of multiple angles and factors. in this game your time is money and you can incur losses. you can scale and take on risks that result in crippling losses (the police can catch you and seize your stuff) you can be conservative and bold, you can become greedy or find balance. As far as management type sims go, it's really enjoyable and it suprisingly even has little bits of detail and smart design that shine in some spots (such as the hip hop soundtrack where certain apartments and cars play certain songs as you are near them giving the janky little city a kind of 'real' feel to it, or the way your phone doubles as a way to let you know there is a new order coming, what time it is, as well as flashlight, literally the only tool you need) despite it's many rather garish flaws and I'd still recommend it to anyone who thinks it seems like it might be interesting. If you like messing with crafting table mods in bethesda games you'll appreciate whats done here most likely, because it's very much built around that idea. The stealth dynamic is neat and makes the game play a bit more interesting but it's incredibly basic. Even with a main quest (meh, kinda), and a tier-ish upgrade system, overall, this game is repetitive and shallow, and it would be nice to have a bit of things you could do with your wealth besides amass large stockpiles of illicit substances. The way the game illustrates some concepts like stretching/diluting a batch and money-laundering and how that translates into vast returns extremely quick is very notable, and thought-provoking. It very much seems to do what the title suggest. It just doesn't go about doing it in the most professional manner, and despite my unprescribed fun, and enjoyment I feel three stars is considerable generous.

knock knock you awake bethesda/rockstar or have the professionals left the building there too?

oh one final message, one that Bethesda doesn't deliver: