Despite its flaws, I really enjoyed my time with the GearCity, and I'd say it's one of the best, if not the best, business simulators on Steam. And in this (long?) review, I want to share my experience with this game and talk about its pros and cons from my point of view.

First of all, here's what I like about this game:

1. Strategy personalization: Believe me, this game offers an incredible amount of personalization in all layers of the game, even in the strategic layer. Some of these personalizations may even fundamentally change your gaming experience. Examples:

A) You can run your company as a stock trader, which not only helps you get rid of the hassle of running branches and factories, but also effectively turns the game into a completely different game from a "car company simulator" to a "stock market simulator".

B) You can run your company as an design house and focus on R&D and component design in order to license and obtain royalties.

C) You can run your company as a car rebadger, meaning you buy assembled cars from the AI and resell them instead of actually manufacturing them.

D) And of course you can be a car manufacturer which is the main theme of the game and the game offer you a long list of options to build and manage your car company.

You can be creative and combine the strategies mentioned above in any way you wish, thus strategically personalizing your company.

2. Thematic personalization: The game offers the ability to create sub-brands for your main brand, which is one of my favorite features, and even opens the door for some role-playing. Would you like to imagine yourself as a great inventor who builds super luxury cars that no one needs but everyone wants? Okay, so you can use the in-game branding system and create a brand named whatever you wish and role-play it. Want to go full Henry Ford II and win Le Mans? Create another sub-brand and role-play it. For this type of themed personalizations, you're limited more by your imagination than the game.

3. Management personalization: The game offers a lot of AI-assisted automation, from "auto production" to "auto marketing", "auto distribution", "auto hire" and "auto wages", do you prefer to micro-manage everything from zero to hero? Well then, disable the automation. Would you like to "hire" the AI as "chief operating officer" to manage some aspect of your company? Simply enable automation. Long story short you can personalize how involved you are in running your company.

4. Semi-randomization or even more: When playing with default settings, historical events are a factor, but there is still some semi-randomization that makes the game more interesting. The game also offers an option to play with random history, which I admit I haven't tried (yet).

Now is the time for cons:

1. Poorly worded: My biggest problem with this game is that some elements of this game are so poorly worded that they are misleading. To explain this here, I would like to share my experience with one of the most misleading elements in the game, which is the "Profit" in "City Sales Report".

When I studied my city's sales report for first time, I saw the "Profit" at the top of the last column, up to this point everything was perfect, but when I studied the numbers in the "Profit" column, the problem started. Surprisingly, the numbers were nonsense. According to the column, my company has already "profited" over 500k in NY and slightly less than 200k in Chicago in the previous turn, but when I checked my cash flow for the same turn, it was -20k in the red. At first I thought it was tax, so I checked other reports, but there was no sign of tax being paid. Hmm, how is that possible? How is it that I have more than 700,000 in "profit" in two cities and I don't pay any taxes and have no other expenses outside of those two "profitable" cities, but I still have a cash flow of -20,000? Nonsense, this can't be real. So I was playing the game, but all the "profit" numbers looked wrong, every turn the city sales report claimed that all my cities were making a "profit", but those "profits" weren't reflected in my cash flows, and I had no idea what was going on.

To be honest, it took me a while to figure out where the problem was. The problem was the difference between the definition of the "profit" in my mind and the same word in the city's sales report. In my mind "profit" is defined as "your profit is your income minus your expenses" and I think most people on the planet define "profit" the same way. May I ask how you define "profit"? (Please, answer me in the comments section). Anyway, to be 100% sure I even double-checked myself by looking up "profit" in the Cambridge Dictionary, which says:

"Profit" is "money that is earned in trade or business after paying the costs of producing and selling goods and services" #Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/profit

But "profit" is not defined in this way in the city's sales report (!). To quote the game developer (who is a very nice and responsive person):

"The city report shows "Production" as in factory expenses. The report does not include the material costs of vehicles.

The one in the branch window is a more detailed breakdown because we have more space there.

I will see if I can work material costs into the city report. However, I am not hopeful because of the limited horizontal space. I may add it to the profits, but then people will complain about the math not adding up in the report.

It's ticketed for the next update in several months." #source: https://steamcommunity.com/app/285110/discussions/0/7953989873646397809/#c7953989873647676791

Please note that the material costs of vehicles are bulk of your expenses in this game, so in practice the "profit" in the city sales report is defined in such a way that it does not subtract your expenses from your income.

This difference in how "profit" is defined was the root of my confusion.

During my time with the game, I had moments like the one above, where I was confused by how poorly worded and misleading some elements were.

2. HUGE SAVE FILES: The save files in this game can be really big (+200MB), the game does not support steam cloud for saves, but you can always use third-party cloud services to sync your saves. Depending on how often you save and how many different devices you're syncing, doing this may eat up a significant amount of your data plan.

Sorry for the possible typos and thanks for reading.


2024-02-20: Published.
2024-02-21: Fixed broken links for quotes.