Constructor is a very creative game, a classic from my childhood when games came in those PC Gamer magazines. In this game the player takes over a construction company and have to build homes and infrastructured for his tenants, while fending off attacks by your competitors. There are 5 maps and the game game can be played with 1-4 players, either AI or in multiplayer; those being Green, Red, Blue and Yellow. The basic description of this game is utter chaos: from tenants complaining all the time to buildings blowing up, to people trying to steal your buildings.
The main attractiveness of this game is in its amazing variety of characters, all of them with their own animations and personalities. Foremen, workers, repair staff, mobsters and undesirables. The sounds of this game are so memorable the player immediately understands what's going on. A very simple concept explored very well. Tenants can have gripes with one another, and every different kind has their own complaining animations, with some complaining with their wife and kids, others are simply angry and being held by their wife. Some tenants have special preferences, like an especific fence or, in the case of the hippies, a dislike for policemen - and thus opening breaches in your estates - while others are more helpful. Starting with the level 3 tenants, each 5th tenant of the same type will generate an specialist who will help the player in some way (lower taxes, neighbourhood watch, etc). Tenants have 5 different levels, from pooerst to rich, and each level has two distinct types of tenant - one to pay rent and another to reproduce.
One of the game's most fulfilling aspects is the decoration of rooms in each home, with a 3D view of the rooms in its four different levels. It was always amusing to have high class rooms in humble shacks, but they also serve a purpose: beds get breeding faster, bathrooms ease the attrition of homes (always in need of maintenance), living rooms diminish the tenants' interest in outside affairs and kitchens improve their life spam. Everything is properly explained in-game.
The game have 5 game modes with victory conditions being: financial (get one million pounds), egotistical (build a pyramid), world domination (have a home in each estate on the map), utopia (happiness over 90%) and free style (no end). The first two are basic aims, while world domination provides a little challenge and utopia is insanely hard.
As a construction company, you have to manage teams of workers under a foreman and build factories in order to produce materials so as to build homes and service facilities (such as hospitals and parks). You have to manage your finances, dealing with the bank and the prefecture, and even the mob if you are so inclined. You live by your tenants rent and by completing missions to the prefecture (some of them are actually game ending if you fail). The first important mission given by the prefecture is to get rid of a troublesome enemy tenant; failure to do so will result in your sacking, with a cutscene showing you getting buried alive!
As you progress, your enterprise gets more sophisticated with better materials, a gadget factory, hospitals, computers and schools in order to breed smarter tenants and, of course, better types of Undesirables. Here is where Constructor achieves insanity! Undesirables are troublemakers that will damage rival construction companies. The first ones are fairly harmless and merely annoying, with following undesirables being able to blow up enemy buildings and cause larger disturbances. The ghosts can haunt houses, psychos can destroy them with a chainsaw, and, saving the most crazy for last, there is a clown that can hypnotize characters and make them get launched into the air in a fatal rocket ride (the sound of the poor guy smashing into the ground is hilarious).
The game crashes from time to time, thus forcing the player to save often. A major annoyance of Constructor is the curse of enemy foremen slapping your fences all the time, trying to still your buildings, and forcing you to rebuild said fences. This is a superfluous mechanic since it really takes a lot of time to complete one said acquisition and when the game changes to "Re-build a fence simulator" it really gets tiresome. Worse still, when rebuilding fences the game sometimes glitch, forcing you to sell the house (as you cannot rebuild the fence and the tenant keeps complaining). Sometimes the game glitches when you want to upgrade one of your industries, forcing you to blow it up (and sometimes even forcing you to rebuild it somehwere else). Ordering thugs to fight enemy thugs crashes the game instantly. Those problems where already present in the original version and could be tweaked in the Steam version.
Wrapping it all up, Constructor is a simple but effective game. It entertains and even amazes the player among the chaos of explosions, tenant complaints, and the game sounds of ordinary construction and fights with rivals companies. This game guarantees hours of simple, honest gaming fun.
