NobleGamer Turmoil Review

I highly recommend this game on sale to anyone who enjoys simulation or strategy games, and deserves at least a look even at full price. I find it often an oddly relaxing game for me, but always engaging in the hunt for oil and even gas in the normal and expert campaigns that I've played at ~10 hours each. Its a real time strategy game in that all actions are in real time when finding & drilling for oil. After each "year" in a location drilling, there will be an opportunity to buy upgrades, buy favors from people at the saloon, borrow cash from the bank, bid on the next place to drill, and later buy shares to become the mayor of the city. I would've considered bought this game in Early Access if I had known about it earlier, as it only spent one year there. Pros: +Presentation & music: Perfectly captures the essence of drilling for oil the 1800's with the game's looks and soundtrack, which helps the game be oddly relaxing for me. The latter comes free with the game, albeit with a short number of tracks. +Strategy: There's the real time part of handling the finding and drilling of oil, along with fluctuating prices and whether to sell or store the oil for later selling at a higher price. Outside of the year to year operations, there's considerable strategy of what upgrades to buy and when versus land & town share bidding. +Upgrades: There were plenty of upgrades such that I didn't get to unlock them all for any given town building. The game's expert mode made me focus on what's the most critical to getting all the oil drilled & sold in a given year. +Integrated tutorials/tips: As you start out in the game, the tutorial is well done, and same goes for the tips given after buying most upgrades. Very few if any tips are isolated to the pay-to-open envelopes (nominal in-campaign cash) behind the mayor's office. +Speed up & pause exist: I'm very glad there's a speed up option, which I found especially useful when I'm down to my last oil deposit and am just waiting for it to be emptied out. Pause is nice during realtime, but doesn't allow for you to do anything other than look at most of what's going on. +Single Level customization: There's a mode that lets you setup a game year in a particular location along with the amount of oil, rocks, and/or gas. Can use seed numbers to share with other players and "compete" for higher scores. Neutral: ~Ongoing periodic development: Dev game updates since release (#27-34) have averaged about once a month, which is good, but I'll just leave this quote from their Dec 14 2016 news/post here: "But we do like to investigate the possibility of more content in the form of a new map/areas. And if we do, we would probably want to add a game mechanic to the game. IF we go that direction we will consider releasing it as paid DLC. We’re also considering more drastic changes to the Single Level game mode that would allow for Leaderboards and Challenges." Give all existing owners the first DLC for free, and I'll move this to the Pros section ;) ~No mid year saving: On the pause menu there's an option to abort the current year, but that's the equivalent of stopping all your progress and only taking what $ you've already earned. My guess is that each year without pausing or speed up takes 10-15 minutes, so make sure you can dedicate that amount of time or be willing to pause after starting a new year. ~Only a little built in save scumming: The game saves immediately after a drilling year is over. So that means if you make some town purchases or bidding that you don't like, you can exit before going drilling (starting the next year), reload your save, and you'll be back in town as if that town stuff didn't happen. I only used this in town share bidding in expert mode a couple times, and I still lost the campaign. Cons: -Wagon management: Its simple and easy to use, which may be better than being too complex or cumbersome, but its simplicity can cause some inefficiencies that may lead to expensive oil spillage. Changing the wagons from one company to another (Left Inc vs. Right Inc) can be disruptive if any of them are carrying oil (fair for strategy I guess), you can't assign wagons to a particular rig, and can't assign a rig's oil to go to a particular company (if my rig is on the left side, I'd like some of its wagons/oil to go Left Inc). I wouldn't call the wagon logic terribly buggy though - Its just that on rare occasions some wagons will behave in a way I don't expect, most notably when wagon counts are split between left & right. -Weak campaign end game: Winning the campaign only does two things - Gives at least one achievement and gives you a "Replay Bonus Island" where there's max oil, gas, and rocks. The island is cool but doesn't add much extra gameplay for me. -Only 1 campaign save spot available: Didn't bother me, but might bother some people. Like mentioned earlier, there's very little save scumming built into this game.