[h1]Overview:[/h1]
Slumlord Simulator is a turn-based management simulation in which a player starts with one slum, and from there can use the adjacant forested areas to make money or have the trees removed for further development which can make the player more money and allow for more adjacant lands to be either used in some form. Of course, nobody really enjoys the lifestyle associated with living in a slum, so tenants become restless after awhile and riot, which means you're going to have to invest in bodyguards, an armored car, and/or a bunker if you want to stay alive, all while buying your way to various goods and services which will then allow for the player to escape to Bermuda with their ill-gotten money within a set time limit. (One hundred turns for the hard level, one hundred fifty turns for the medium level, and two hundred turns for the easy level.)
[h1]Graphics and Sound:[/h1]
It's nice that there are some graphics, even though this game could have just as easily been a text-based game. The graphics do their job when you click on the various developed (and undeveloped) squares to get a first hand view of slums, forests, and plains with a road running through them. The music on the other hand, isn't bad, but it's a failure on the grounds that the music does absolutely nothing to set the mood of the game. My advice is to mute the music, and play the D.R.I. song [i]Slumlord[/i].
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1435067418
[h1]Positives:[/h1]
This game is pure evil! Raising rents and blaming it on a new "noise tax"? You can do that. Distill moonshine inside of the slum? You can do that, too! (For the most part, I find it better to use unpaid interns to improve the slum to collect more rent money.) Don't want to pay professional timber cutters twenty thousand dollars to cut down trees, yet don't have the patience for locals to cut down trees? You can do that as well by hiring goons to burn down forests. Put forested areas to use by setting up meth labs in them? Oh hell yeah! Cleared-out areas can also be put to use by building another slum, but you can also set up farms or factories which pay leases, but new slums built in cleared-out areas don't agitate tenants like having too many farms or factories. But if one doesn't have the money to develop a cleared space yet doesn't want the space to be occupied for the length of a farm or factory, cleared spaces can be utilized by either using the roads for illegal drag races or as runways for drug smugglers.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1435070111
The game puts no face on the tenants too unfortunate to have to live in your slum, which invokes the memory of Vincent Gardenia from [i]The Super[/i]: "Will you stop about the tenants? Remember, they used to live in huts. They used to eat people. You feel better now? Hey, come on, who gives a (explitive deleted) about a few whiny kookaboos"?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1435067906
[h1]Negatives:[/h1]
Despite all of the good evil fun, I got burnt out on this game really fast. First I played on the easy level, and then I felt like I was good enough to play on the medium level, and I beat the game there, too. Then I played the game on the hard level, and SA-PRIZE, I made it to Bermuda in less than a hundred turns! Then I decided to just play on easy and let the game drag on, and afterwards, the game just lost it's charm. That isn't to say that this game is bad, because there's other games like FTL and Star Merchant which I've had fun with over the years I purchased for being dirt cheap and good casual managers for when hardcore management games like Motorsport Manager get too tedious, and I was burnt out on those other two games, too. (I still go back to FTL and Star Merchant every so often.)
Despite having three difficulty levels, the only difference the difficulty makes, is how much time you have to flee to Bermuda. Otherwise, tenants become just as quickly agitated, just as hard to please, and riots are just as difficult to stop on the easy level as they are on the hard level.
Slumlord Simulator has no trading cards for this game. Certainly you would think that the developers could have come up with some humorous badges, but maybe the developers simply couldn't come up with emoticons depicting grotesque symbols of wealth or profile backgrounds of very sad looking slums.
Apart from the lack of trading cards, the Steam overlay does not work with this game, so unless you have magic powers like I do, you won't be able to upload any of your screenshots to Steam to show off to your friends like I can. (Just kidding about the magic powers! I found out how to upload screenshots to games that do not support the Steam overlay from another game that also doesn't support the overlay.)
Sorry Jimmy Dali, but despite having "Simulator" in the name, this game isn't a simulation in the true sense of the term, so you can't travel first person around your awful residence and interact with tenants by dropping Joe Pesci quotes from [i]The Super[/i].
[h1]Conclusion:[/h1]
You better wait until this game goes on sale, because you're going to be paying quite a bit for a game you're liable to get burnt out on very quickly. Even though it seems strange that this game gets a positive recommendation despite the negatives, Slumlord Simulator fills the niche of an economical game that one would play either to pass a little time, or because the player needs a break from their AAA game because it became too tedious. In case you don't remember [i]The Super[/i] which I mentioned several times, watch this trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNagUc6w0XI
[h1]The honest word of Il Pallino... OR ELSE![/h1]
This review provided independently by [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/11739878-ReviewExperts/]ReviewExperts.[/url]
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