Giant Machines 2017

My spreadsheet brain wanted to love this one. Seven distinct machine types, a 14-mission campaign stitched together by a single overarching goal, environmental variety spanning snowfields and tornado corridors - on paper, that is a tidy, coherent structure. In practice, Giant Machines 2017 is a game that blows its best hand in the opening hour and then quietly folds. The sense of scale is the genuine highlight, and it lands hard. Switching from a small buggy to the bucket-wheel excavator - a machine that would not fit inside a football stadium - produces a real jolt. Climbing 100 metres of ladder to reach the cockpit is legitimately impressive the first time. The seven vehicles on offer include the Bagger excavator, a bulldozer, a dumper truck, a demolition cutter, a car crane, a digger, and the crawler-transporter that hauls a space shuttle to its launch pad. Each has its own control layout, and the game does ask you to manipulate arms, buckets, and crane hooks manually rather than pressing a single "do work" button. That granularity is appreciated. The in-cab first-person view works well for the larger machines and the included Machine Library, a 3D model viewer with technical specs, is a small but welcome extra for people who actually care about hydraulic tonnage figures. The problems are structural and they compound. Speed is the central issue: most of the large machines top out around 10 km/h unloaded, and the crawler carrying the shuttle limps along at closer to 5 km/h. That is not automatically a dealbreaker for a sim - train and truck sims live in that space comfortably - but those genres compensate with scenery, traffic, or genuine mechanical depth. Giant Machines 2017 compensates with fetch quests. A typical mission has you drive a buggy to a broken machine, retrieve a component, repair it at a workbench, carry it back, then actually start the machine work. The filler pads out a campaign that reviewers have consistently clocked at roughly seven hours. A Time Attack mode unlocks post-campaign with bronze, silver, and gold medal targets, which adds some legs for completionists, but it does not fix the pacing of the story content. The tornado escape missions inject urgency, though critics noted the second one felt like repetition rather than escalation. Camera angles across several of the more unusually shaped vehicles are awkward regardless of which view you pick. For newcomers to the industrial sim genre, the accessibility bar is actually reasonable. Controls support full gamepad remapping (Xbox and PlayStation pads both work), instructions arrive via voiced pop-ups from a mid-western narrator who pauses the action rather than burying objectives in menus, and checkpoints are generous enough that a mistake rarely costs more than a few minutes. There is no punishment loop that demands mastery before you see the next machine. That is the correct approach for a short single-player campaign, and I will give the developers credit for it. The custom radio feature also lets you load your own audio files if the in-game stations - which run from licensed rock to some very unexpected classical - do not suit the mood. The honest verdict: this sits in the lower tier of the PlayWay publishing catalogue. It is not broken, and on PC the stability held up reasonably well across coverage I checked. But it lacks the depth to satisfy sim purists and lacks the chaos to entertain sandbox fans. Steam user sentiment sits around 68 percent positive from several hundred reviews, which maps precisely to how it feels - more than half of it works, and the concept is sound, but the execution stops well short of what the premise promises.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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