Game: Gas Station Simulator
Genre: Simulation
System: Steam (Also on Xbox and PS4)
Developer|Publisher: DRAGO Entertainment | HeartBeat Games
Controller Support: Partial
Price: US $17.99 |UK £15.49 | EU € 15,11
Release Date: September 15th, 2021
Review code provided with many thanks to DRAGO Entertainment
Another Simulator
Just when you think they have thought of every simulator game possible another developer comes out to say here’s another one. It seems like a lottery to find out if these types of games are any good or not. The term simulator also doesn’t feel entirely accurate for most of these games with many relying on their glitches and flawed design to perk your interest.
Gas Station Simulator is another game that turns a 9 to 5 job into something quite compelling whilst also offering its own weirdness. If you like your farming games and fancy a bit of a change of gaming career then you may want to consider spending silly amounts of time on this title.
A Good Tidy
You play as a random fella who decides their ambition in life is to create the world’s greatest gas station, or petrol station if you’re British. But that ambition may not be the easiest upward climb you expected. You are gifted an incredibly run-down station with junk and dust littered all over the floor from a rather suspicious uncle. It’s a fixer-upper, that’s for sure, but if the journey was going to be easy I guess that wouldn’t make for much of a game would it.
When you begin the game you are given frequent and very useful tutorials which walk you through the many mechanics that you will soon become accustomed to. Your main objective, to begin with, is to give your venue a thoroughly good clean. I never thought I would say this in a review but the most fun I had in this game was probably grabbing a bin bag and collecting rubbish in it. Then throwing said rubbish bags and other trash in a skip and calling the bin man to come to collect it all. If you love cleaning things Gas Station Simulator most certainly comes highly recommended. Once you find your footing the overall goal is to upgrade your station to the maximum level but, to do that, you need to start making some money.
Make Some Money
You don’t get paid to clean, however, it does make customers think more highly of your establishment improving your overall reputation. To make money you need to man the gas pumps, the retail till and even fix the odd car in your nearby garage. Serving the customers acts as a little mini-game. The gas pumps require you to serve the right amount of gas whilst trying to keep it in the requested region. The tills are a little more complex. You need to grab items, scan them and put them in the basket. Considering you don’t make a lot of money through retail, this mini-game felt a little over the top.
Soon things become quite the balancing act of serving multiple customers whilst also ordering new supplies in. When a delivery comes in you also need to remove it from the van and store it in the warehouse. You also need to be vigilant of thieves, so making sure the warehouse is closed is important. It all feels like quite the juggling act and there is rarely a moment where the tab on the left of the screen doesn’t inform you that a customer or delivery truck is waiting.
As you upgrade your station you are soon given the ability to hire staff to focus on a particular task so you can relax and focus on running the business. Well, sort of! Employees still want breaks and they need to be paid as well. So the juggling act never truly ends. Though hectic, there isn’t really any penalty for getting things wrong. Leave a customer waiting too long and they’ll just drive away. Of course, you can decide as the player when you want to move on. In all honesty, I found doing the repetitive tasks in this game frantic but strangely relaxing. Do a task well and the customer will give you an encouraging thumbs up and possibly a nice tip.
Things get Weird
The game offers plenty of more unusual moments in its design that may baffle or possibly make you laugh. You sometimes have a nasty kid who occasionally runs around your building spraying graffiti on the walls. You can paint over this but it doesn’t appear to deter your customers. Later on, you also get the ability to lock pick car boots when customers or even police are literally looking at you which just seems a tad strange. But it’s yet another way for you to get a little extra pocket money I guess.
When you build a bus station you will sometimes be bombarded with a party bus where a bunch of dancing folk in dinosaur and alien masks come for a massive shopping spree requiring you to serve several of them at once at the tills. Unless you get your employee to do it which I totally did. This really is not your typical game at the gas pumps.
Graphics
Being a simulator style game this is kinda just your typical Unreal Engine with the semi-realistic look to characters, vehicles and the environment. The game does not go out of its way to create a unique art style to make it stand out. But that might be enough for most gamers.
The game does give you the opportunity to paint your buildings. You can give your own unique look to your business but this doesn’t seem to particularly aid you in your progress and since there’s always something to do I rarely found a moment to put time into this.
Niggles
This is a simulator game with a few rough edges. I encountered a few glitches during my time trying to create the ultimate gas station. One of the more humorous ones was when a delivery truck got stuck on a door while leaving the warehouse. It then started to shake before catapulting into the air and then landing upside down. It provided a comical moment for sure.
As well as this, the rubbish I threw in the skip seemed to just stay there permanently. Picking up rubbish bags also seemed a little finicky. None of these glitches was game-breaking and some may find them just a bit funny. The most obvious niggle is the initial load for this game is enormous on my PC. When I initially started this game I thought the darn thing froze or crashed. I guess I should have taken the ‘this may take a while’ tag on the load screen more literally.
There is around 15 hours of content here but you really can play the game at your own pace, unless you decide to take out a loan from your uncle which you need to pay back in a set amount of time. If you do find some downtime you can play some extra mini-games around the site, like driving a remote control car around a track and play a little basketball, once you unlock it that is.
You can also upgrade various aspects of the Gas Station, such as the warehouse and garage, but also smaller things like the toilets and displays around the site. There is plenty to keep you engaged.
Conclusion – A Day at the Pumps
Gas Station Simulator ends up as one of the better ‘simulator’ games out there. Tasks get repetitive and there are moments where I did think to myself ‘why am I spending so much time playing this.’ But ultimately it held my attention and I enjoyed running my station even if it did have a few rough edges. I guess like running a real Gas Station this game is filled with financial challenges. The stress of juggling customers and employees and after a long gaming session you feel like you need a good sit down with a good coffee. But despite all this, it makes for a pretty fun video game. But I can’t guarantee running a Gas Station in real life would be this much fun.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot
