Spice Road

Dear reader, Below please find my unenthusiastic recommendation for Spice Road: The concept is interesting for about 7 hours. What kills this game is the repetitive click-fest (even with the game on pause) to build several practically identical towns, as every building has to be built individually. If you see screenshots of enormous towns for this game -- yeah. Every single building has to be placed individually, and if you have 6 or more towns that becomes a new clicking game of itself, which I don't enjoy. The game is not nearly as deep as I had hoped from some of the reviews. Worst of all, the tutorial "storyline" is mandatory to access all the buildings in sandbox. I would rather do away with the tutorial altogether, but forcing me to play it did show some interesting scenarios in the process. It also guaranteed I would not have an adequate comprehension of the game BEFORE my 2 hour request Steam for a refund period. So yeah -- the game is okay. It could certainly be better. It could certainly not force players through the tutorial and still allow for varied challenges if the developer had wanted to provide more options to the sandbox mode. But instead, sandbox is inextricably tied to the amount of the tutorial the player has accomplished. There is a technology tree, which allows access to buildings and building upgrades, but points for the technology tree only occur in the tutorial storyline as levels are completed. Hence the tree is merely a means of blocking sandbox access to the full building menu until all the whole storyline is completed. Once you start to win, once the wheel begins to turn, there's practically nothing to stop you. But getting to that point can be an interesting challenge. I would only recommend this to die-hard tycoon fans.