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Construction Simulator 2 review - The name says it all

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Construction Simulator 2 review - The name says it all

If you're a fan of doing the same task over and over again with little incentive to keep going, then boy howdy is Construction Simulator 2 the game for you.

And if you love fighting with a game's dreadful controls, convoluted objective system, and generally buggy world, then it's a wonder you haven't already picked it up.

A hellish nightmare from which one can never truly recover, Construction Simulator 2 will break you in ways you didn't even know were possible – and that's just the tutorial.

Dig in

The main objective of Construction Simulator 2 is to build up your own firm. You start by driving around a desolate town doing odd jobs and gathering whatever coin you can to keep afloat.

Driving is where you run into your first issues, given thegame's unwieldy control scheme. Accelerating, braking, and reversing are handled by two virtual buttons, and you steer with a weird slider thing.

Accelerating shouldn't be an issue, but given that you seem to fly around at twice the speed of the rest of the traffic, and that running red lights and colliding with other cars gets you an instant fine from the police, you need to find some way to stick to a regular speed or lose all your cash.

Steering is even worse, requiring an unprecedented level of finesse just to round a corner. Even just keeping your finger in the required zone is difficult, and if you don't you'll lose the ability to turn altogether.

Hard graft

Somehow manage to find your destination and things change from annoying to straight-up dull, as you're given one of very few menial tasks to perform.

Most of this appears to revolve around shovelling dirt – a task that seems easy, but is again made difficult by the awful virtual controls and the game's general inability to work out when your task is complete.

And that's even if your objective stays where it is. One task sees you trying to unearth a pipe that you then need to load onto your digger.

After spending ten minutes digging it out the damn thing had teleported into the middle of the road and caused a traffic jam.

Thankfully there are measures in place to get past this - at any time you can restart an objective, skip a certain step, or just abandon the whole thing altogether if needs be.

And to be fair to the game, driving around with reckless abandon to its weirdly good soundtrack can be quite fun.

Quitting time

But to play Construction Simulator 2 as it expects you to is a horrendous chore, filled with bugs, clumsy controls, and mind-numbing objectives.

Only a true masochist would put up with teleporting objects, horrible virtual buttons, and hours of dirt-shovelling.

It may be true to life in some ways, but unless you really want to find out how difficult life as a construction worker is, you'll probably want to steer clear.

Construction Simulator 2 review - The name says it all

As boring and laborious as the real thing, Construction Simulator 2 may be accurate in some ways, but it's not worth playing
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.