The only thing that has calloused my hands over the years has been musical instruments, lots and lots of instruments. I’m dyslexic, I wouldn’t even know how to spell the words hard labor… ignore that. There are only two things I’ve made with my hands, a birdhouse and a piggy bank, and both are wonky and rough. So when it came to starting my own construction company in Construction Simulator, I’m sure the planning permissions board had their own second thoughts against this one. Nonetheless, I plowed ahead and did my best Jeremy Clarkson impersonation, though without the causal racism, and took up a job I had no business doing.

One of those very German simulators, Construction Simulator (2022) seems to be the reboot of the 2014 release of Construction Simulator 2015 and its sequels Construction Simulator 2 from 2017 with a third in 2019. I’ll be the first to take a swing at German-developed simulators, as they plagued the bargain bins of the late-2000s electronics stores before they would spread across Steam like an infectious disease. While weltenbauer. Software Entwicklung GmbH’s latest release is very German by nature, there was actually something enjoyable beyond the alien design.

The very first thing that threw me off from the word go was the use of the left analog stick to move through menus, and you will only use that stick. I would make a joke about it being very German and thus correct because we all know the only thing about the Germans is that they are efficient. No, this isn’t being efficient or well designed, it is beyond ridiculous to try and move up and down a menu with such an imprecise method when the directional buttons are right there. I mention this because it is a problem everywhere, most noticeably on the menu for buying vehicles as you flick past everything you want.

Alien, that’s how I’d describe the camera controls too, as you’d typically assign the right analog stick to the camera. While that is true here, it isn’t the default: To get the camera while in a vehicle, you need to click in the left stick before you use the right one to look around. That is because vehicle functions are also assigned to your right stick. Why wasn’t that inverted or given an option to invert that? I don’t know. I do know that you can change the level of aggression that the camera will have when trying to realign or if you want that stick click to be a hold or something else completely useless too.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played far too much of Construction Simulator for my own good this last week, liking, if not loving most of it. There are problems, however, and they are very noticeable and annoying ones at that. The very reason I say the controls are annoying is that, yes, you can assign your own controls, but you’d have to go through all of them one-by-one if you wanted to, making accessibility a hassle to even have. I particularly wanted to change the crane operation controls from just the sticks so I could then include the non-functioning back buttons of RT/LT and RB/LB. You can’t unless you want to reassign every button in-game.

Little bits like this made the entire experience chip away at the enjoyment, such as traffic lights. Open World games like GTA or otherwise will hardly keep the traffic lights red long enough to run across the intersection, this is a basic game design technique to keep traffic flowing, while the illusion of a living world is kept alive. Now a large part of Construction Simulator is a day-night cycle that will tick along, and at the start of a new day (1 AM) your bills will be paid if you have active rentals or outstanding loans. With traffic lights that hold you for enough time to walk over the intersection twice, (I tested this) that is more money going down the drain.

A little trick I found was to go over into the oncoming lane, barrel through the red light, and not get charged the $100 fine by the cops. The other option, which I later took because I was sick of sending multi-ton trucks through intersections like that, was to turn off traffic offenses: I was already getting done for speeding when nothing would tell me the speed limit, so why was I being charged for that? So much of the design here in Construction Simulator feels like it is not there to make the world more realistic in a gamified way or fun, it is there to just get in the way.

For example, the world maps (Europe and the US) are rather large and jobs can be hundreds or even thousands of meters away. For each job, you require several machines: Excavators, dump trucks, trailers, cranes, and so on. Each of which needs to be moved from your yard either one by one or track-based machines can be loaded onto trailers, and it takes a while, something only made worse by the simple matter of loading every time you need to be teleported more than twelve feet away. I think the average load time on the Xbox One as I experienced it 1:30-2:00.

To say that this is exhausting would be an understatement, but it was taken to a whole new level when I experienced 15 crashes to the Xbox desktop in my playtime. The in-game stats tell me I’ve played for far less than the 40-hour achievement would suggest or that GOG assumes to be a full working week with overtime, that I did not have. Match this with a few typical physics bugs of any simulator, the annoyances of being unable to use the forklifts outside of my yard, trucks and trailers that are as stiff as your nan’s knickers, and a GPS that doesn’t know where it wants to go alongside everything else already mentioned, and it would be easy to write off Construction Simulator.

I didn’t, however, as I found myself enjoying what was underneath all the inconveniencies and annoyances of completely foreign design. At the core of your motivation is to build things, but as seemingly the only contractor in town, and for the longest while the only employee, you’re building everything. Boardwalks to holiday homes with pools, I built the entire college sports complex and their newest building, and I even drilled, placed, and tarred an entire bridge on the far end of town. I felt as if I was building the town from what was not rundown, but certainly being left behind.

Were the constructions perfect? No. There were points where I’d do X, Y, and Z, but A, B, and C would be auto-completed for whatever reason. A majority of the time I assumed it was done to avoid extreme crashes or the occasional graphical glitch that I encountered that could very easily cause seizures and were fixed by pausing and unpausing. For me, those weren’t excruciating problems, but I think anyone with commonsense could understand why those are more than worth noting. Similar to the percentage meters of PowerWash Simulator, the auto-complete fill-in function will look over rather obvious gaps.

I did enjoy the skip function on jobs, particularly the ones that required the concrete pump with its unwieldy boom arm that felt like it had a mind of its own. The only odd thing about it was that there was no punishment. Unless you were using materials, there seemed to be little to no actual punishment for skipping the task, including your total pay at the end of the contract being cut. Not all jobs were skippable, particularly the concrete work for that bridge I mentioned, which I can somewhat understand but it doesn’t make the controls of that boom arm any easier.

Graphically and performance wise Construction Simulator isn’t wonderful on the Xbox One. Later on, whenever an auto-save would come up, I was unsure if it was a dip in performance or it was going to be another crash. It seems the limit is being pushed graphically for the little console that could, but that limit sadly is still in 2016. For some, that is an issue that they can’t get over for some reason, but when I’m digging up someone’s front yard to lay some pipes or controlling one of those massive mobile cranes, I couldn’t be happier than a pig in its own swill. It is a 5-year-old’s fantasy.

Yeah, there are contractions on the whole construction part of Construction Simulator, you aren’t going to pull out a hammer and build a house nail by nail. Though I still believe there are some things that could have been done to make the experience a bit more fun. The fact you have to move each vehicle by hand on your own makes multiplayer far more appealing, but for single-player, I’d have preferred the ability to select a few that could be transported similarly to the fast travel. I wouldn’t mind paying the extra for that, as fast travel incurs fees anyway.

Ultimately, Construction Simulator is heavily flawed and for a number of people will be outright confusing by design, but I can’t help wanting to end my actual day with some construction work. Beyond the inaccessibility of the control scheme being easily altered and the copious other issues mentioned, I found Construction Simulator to be fun. I challenge any grown man (or woman) to sit first-person in a huge excavator, digging holes to build a parking garage in the center of town, and not get the joy of a 5-year-old.

An Xbox One review copy of Construction Simulator was provided by Astragon Ent. for this review.

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Construction Simulator

$34.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• I'm just a kid with their big construction toys
• Fun in that sedated "boring" way.

Cons

• A lack of ease in accessibility when remapping controls.
• Camera controls
• Multiple crashes and questionable performance