Car Park Capital: MicroProse is publishing a game about bulldozing neighbourhoods for tarmac

The best Steam review of the week is six words long.

"Trains have tracks, but cars have freedom!"

Another, just below it, manages four: "marx spoke of this."

That is the mood. And that is why Car Park Capital is, to my considerable surprise, the game I most want to talk about today.

The pitch, which is a joke held all the way through

You have been hired by Big Auto to unleash the Freedom of Car Dependency on unsuspecting townsfolk.

You design the slickest parking lots ever seen. Then you convince the citizens they absolutely need them. You spread glossy pro-car propaganda, you outsmart those pesky anti-petrol protesters, and you turn quiet neighbourhoods into a parking empire.

All of it, says the store page, for profit. But mostly for freedom.

There are satirical games that put the joke in the description and then make a normal game. This one does not let go: you buy land, you demolish homes, you install oil derricks, and you raise your parking fees until people crack.

And you can read anyone's thoughts. Literally: you click a passer-by and find out whether they have embraced the car yet, or whether they are annoyed by your ever-increasing fees and the sight of your oil drills.

That is the kind of mechanic that turns satire into a system. You are not watching a public opinion bar rise and fall, you are watching one specific person decide that this neighbourhood has become unliveable.

And underneath, it is a real management game

That is what got me. The joke alone could have sold two thousand copies. The studio made a tycoon.

Real-time simulation, with hundreds of vehicles and citizens, all bald for reasons known only to the studio. Three-dimensional construction tools, so multi-storey car parks, not merely flat seas of asphalt. An economy linking car sales, oil consumption, how busy your car parks are, and the town's mood.

One player sums up the sensation better than I can: a love letter to old tycoon games while remaining something you pick up immediately. Another says three hours vanished at once.

The publisher is MicroProse. That name means something to a certain generation: it is Sid Meier's house, the home of Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates!. It was relaunched a few years ago and now publishes a lot of niche strategy.

Them putting their name on a game mocking car dependency has a particular flavour, when you remember they published the most famous railway tycoon game in history.

The problem, and there is only one

96 per cent positive out of 134 reviews. An excellent reception.

And when you read the handful of negative ones, they all say exactly the same thing.

The tutorial is too short. People do not understand how to make money.

I am quoting, because the consistency is striking. One player cannot get past the second level because he does not know how to generate enough income to buy the land. Another writes that the game screams it was made for him, but that he apparently lacks the brain capacity to work it out. A third loves the graphics and genuinely wonders what he is meant to be doing beyond his single car park.

This is not a game that is too hard. It is a game that does not explain its economy.

There is also a balance complaint about the first scenario: fuel stays low whatever you do, footfall drops for no visible reason, and protesters set fire to cars you can only clear with despairingly slow tow trucks.

And one ergonomic request that recurs: you cannot build while paused. In a real-time management game where you are laying out multi-storey car parks, that is an absence you feel every minute.

What it is worth today

This is an early access release that went live this morning at 14.84 euros, and it should be judged as such: the foundation is there, the identity is strong, and the list of what is missing is short and named.

What I like, fundamentally, is that the satire is not a veneer. In most management games you are neutral: you optimise a system, and the system has no opinion about you. Here, every decision is a position. Flattening a house for forty extra spaces is an economic calculation and a political act, and the game lets you read the mind of the person who lived there.

That is a great deal smarter than it looks under the bright colours and the bald citizens.

If you are stuck on money in the first scenario, you are not alone and it is not you. We have written a guide to getting started explaining the economy the tutorial skips.

And if you find flattening a neighbourhood for tarmac morally questionable, be aware that the game agrees with you entirely. That is precisely the joke.

Got an entirely tarmacked town to show us? We want the screenshot on the InsertCoins Discord.