Costa Verde Transport Department is a game where you design a network of roads that can handle the stress of traffic. I will cut to the chase with this game as well. It’s mediocre at best and there’s really no reason to play this game over a similar game such as Mini Motorways.
The main flaw of Costa Verde is that the road designing mechanic does not work well at all. For most other games focusing on or containing elements where you build a network of roads, it is essential for the game that building the roads feels intuitive and natural. It’s the core element of the game and if the core doesn’t feel good, nothing else will.
Most games will let you lay out roads in neat grids and seamlessly integrate a local network with a highway system and so forth. In Costa Verde Transport Department, it is very difficult to get a neat grid and instead most of the roads turn out to be abominations with a lot of curves and roundabouts. This wouldn’t be a problem if the roads were built the way you traced them on the map and connect in a way that made sense.
The game has many, and what I believe to be unnecessary, facets that prevent you from laying out your desired plan, be it elevation changes from cliffs, to the degree of curvature being too sharp, and etc. There are more obstacles to prevent you from building the way you want, including the mechanics themselves, than tools to help you build. This is the root of the issue.
Don’t even get me started on integrating a highway system. It’s so obtuse that it only provides frustration and even if you figure it out to some degree, it’s very hard to replicate the results. This creates a feeling of frustration and honestly tests my patience because I feel like I’m always fighting the controls to do anything at all.
This leads me to a question, why would I bother playing a frustrating game and spend a lot of time and effort to make it less frustrating when I could play a game that is fun to begin with and only gets better as I spend more time on it. I think it’s a rather unrealistic expectation to place the onus on the person playing the game to spend their valuable time on making the game better.
This isn’t to say that Costa Verde Transport Department isn’t without promise. The road design elements need desperate improvement however. For starters, you start with a limited number of road segments and you only get more over time as settlements pop up. This should be changed to constantly generating road segments over time. If I have to balance creating a working grid of streets with making sure I’m expanding enough to get more road segments, then the number of initial road segments have to be higher and the maps need to be larger. The focus of the game needs to be changed from simply building roads to more of a puzzle game.
Secondly, the tutorial needs immediate improvement. You can’t simply state that building highways is difficult and that the player will “get” it over time and leave it at that. That’s incredibly lazy and a disservice to the player. You are wasting their time. Show them how to do it. Put some effort into the tutorial if you expect players to put effort into learning the game. It goes both ways.
Thirdly, the highway system needs an overhaul. I should just be able to connect a highway to a road. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. Rotating the map doesn’t help and the most reliable method seems to be to creating a bend and then connecting the highway to the rounded part. Sometimes this isn’t possible, especially in cramped spaces. I can’t think of a single justification as to why this mechanic is so difficult to use. Being this frustrating adds no value to the game.
Finally, some of the fail states need to be removed or better thought out. For example, I created a highway and a city tile spawned on it. However, it also created a fail state because no cars were able to travel to that destination. Try as I might, I was unable to create an exit into that city grid and I sure as heck didn’t have enough road pieces to create a local road to the city. The only way was to delete existing roads but doing so also prevents cars from reaching those areas.
For a game like this, I don’t think fail states are needed. You can add a score or an efficiency rating. Managing to finally build a decent network of roads only for it to fail and having to restart from the beginning because of some arbitrary mechanics is a real bummer.
I did try out the creative mode and let me tell you, the game was not any better. Even with having unlimited resources and no fail state, the feel of building the roads was just not satisfying. I was constantly fighting the game to get the road layout just the way I wanted to. Ain’t nobody got time for this.
Additional Info
Steam Store Page : https://store.steampowered.com/app/2403100/Costa_Verde_Transport_Department/
Review Score: 75% positive with a total of 28 reviews as of this writing (12/08/23)
Developer: Nikita Lisitsa
Publisher: Nikita Lisitsa
Release Date: Oct 31, 2023
MSRP: $9.99
I received a key from keymailer. Thank you so much for the key!
Time spent: 1.5 hours
Achievement Score: N/A
Ducky Obrien 