Constructor, a 20-year-old game that most people probably have never heard of, has been ported to current-gen consoles. I’m always weary when it comes to strategic games on consoles since the control schemes are often difficult to translate from a keyboard to a controller. Let’s see how Constructor fares.
Shady business
Constructor is a strategic business simulator that assigns you the role of an up-and-coming property tycoon. Your task is to build an empire while sabotaging your rivals with mafia-like practices. You start off with a small plot of land that comes with a few workers and foremen. To expand your property and increase your earnings, you have to attract tenants that provide you with either a cash income or extra characters that help you set up facilities that produce resources. There are also the ‘undesirables’, the outcasts of society that you can use to undermine your rival’s operations. Take advantage of your people until you own all of the land plots on the map and have discarded the opposition. The gameplay is not that hard, but it may be a little overwhelming at first since there are a lot of commands you can execute. That’s why I recommend playing the tutorial, even though it’s a little too long.
The game is made by System 3, a British video game developer that does not hold back the typical British humor. Every character in the game speaks with a cockney accent and will often put a smile on your face with their dark sense of humor. If you want to see if this type of humor is to your liking, look up the intro sequence of Constructor. Simply put, the humor Constructor still holds up after 20 years.
Well-made controls
Like I said before, strategic games on consoles often fail to keep my interest due to the control scheme that doesn’t work on a controller. The precise, fine-tuned movement of a mouse pointer is almost impossible to translate to consoles. While Constructor still has some issues with the precise selection of characters, it’s clear that the developers have put a lot of work in the controls. A lot of the commands can be executed with one button, which is quite an accomplishment for a game like this. The dev team has reworked some of the UI to make the gameplay much smoother. The only problem I have with it is the size of text and buttons. If you don’t have a large tv, you’ll probably be sitting close to the screen a lot in order to see what you’re actually doing.
Multiple problems
So far so good, right? Seems like Constructor has received a quality port. Sadly, the actual gameplay experience I had with the game is not something I would recommend to other people. For starters, the computer AI is laughably easy to play against. Whether you’re a veteran strategist or a complete amateur, the chances of you actually losing against the AI is almost non-existent. The only time I lost a game was at the end of the tutorial because I was supposed to lose. If you’re looking for a challenge, then this is not the game you’re looking for.
But that isn’t the only thing that hurts the experience of playing Constructor. The online mode is supposed to be able to put you against up to three other players. The reality, however, is that the multiplayer mode is simply dead. I’ve tried numerous times to find a host, but every time I received a text message that said ‘no games found’. So I tried the other way, I hosted a few games and let people join me. But there are no people to join you since nobody is playing the game. If you want to play against people, you better have some friends that happen to have a copy of Constructor.
Lastly, another gripe I have with the game is the inclusion of missions. These missions are supposed to give you extra objectives to complete while playing the game. I said ‘supposed to’ because the missions are not yet implemented in the game. That’s right, this 20-year-old game that re-released back in May doesn’t have all of its content. If you click the ‘mission’ on the home screen you are then greeted with a simple ‘coming soon’. That’s a pretty bad message to display towards players who paid €40 for an updated game.
On the technical side of things, things aren’t pretty either. I’ve encountered numerous bugs and glitches during my playthrough, with one of them even freezing the entire game. The most recent patch has fixed some of those problems, but there are still technical errors to be found in the game. None of those errors made the game unplayable (except for the time it froze) but bugs and glitches shouldn’t be a thing several weeks after the re-release of a 20-year-old game.
Conclusion
While the gameplay itself has its charms, it fails to offer any challenge. The multiplayer component is dead and the promised missions are not implemented. Some of the bugs and glitches have been fixed with patches, but the others can still be found during short gameplay sessions. In short, at its current state, I can not recommend Constructor to anyone.
