Two passages at Aerosoft allowed me to discover two games during this gamescom 2022, the first was City Bus Manager, a tycoon where you manage a bus company that must meet the needs of the residents of a city, with a rather unique specificity: you can settle anywhere on the planet (except China) since the game generates its playground using data from OpenStreetMap! All is not perfect for all that, but we will come back to it. The second game seen was Zombie Cure Lab, featured in our columns two months ago. A game that had already aroused my curiosity after reading Onidra's article, and that I really want to try now.
City Bus Manager
With CBM, the publisher Aerosoft continues its momentum with an additional management game, which this time focuses on the creation of a bus management company. When creating a game, we are asked to select the name of a city or its postal code. The smiling developer then hands me his keyboard asking in which city I wanted to set up my bus company. I enter the postal code of the city bordering Lille where I live and, after about thirty seconds, I see an extremely precise map of my city. My dumbfounded look amuses my interlocutor who then explains to me that for each part, the data is extracted from OpenStreetMap in order to bring realism to the title. It succeeded ! Then, we must place a small bus depot on the map, we settle on the edge of a road 1km from the city center and the creation of the place begins. Creation of a garage, a rest room, cloakroom, a waiting room for customer service... then recruitment of a first employee to whom we will assign a bus and a line to serve.
Creating a line is quite simple. If lines are already created, you can select stops already established and create frequented stopping points. If you want to install new stops, nothing could be simpler, you click on a route and the stop is created. Once the plot is completed, you can choose the frequency, with a supporting graph that will indicate the low/high times of the day. For these moments of rushes, we can increase the frequency of passage... in short, everything seems to have been thought out to offer a relatively complete simulation as it is, from the installation phase of the deposit to recruitment (salary negotiation and management employee happiness) through customer satisfaction with the routes offered.
However, several improvements remain to be made in my opinion. As it stands, for example, repairing a bus must be done manually, just like cleaning it... Impossible to automate the process, it will therefore be necessary to repeat actions that are not really exciting after a few bus rotations, or after buying a used bus. The game is also a bit austere graphically, and would be more pleasant with a slightly lighter color tint. We bet that by its release at the end of the year, we can see some improvements emerging. Otherwise, you will have to rely on the support of the Steam Workshop to improve the gaming experience!
Zombie Cure Lab
Although we remain in the field of management, Zombie Cure Lab abandon the relative austerity of Aerosoft titles for something much more colorful! The principle of the game is so simple that we don't understand why no one thought of it before the Thera Bytes studio. The zombie apocalypse has taken place, and most of humanity now roams the planet in search of the few remaining living beings. A group of scientists that we lead has however found a cure and manages to reverse the process of zombification so that they become human again. However, this is not done with the snap of a finger, since the captured zombies will have to pass several times through the machine which heals the zombies by transforming them into stage 1, 2 and 3 hombies, beings ogling between the two conditions, with what it entails of advantages and disadvantages. Rank 1 hombies retain the strength of zombies, but do not like to be in contact with humans because their primary instinct pushes them to feast on it... We will therefore create special paths to prevent the two species from intersect before full processing. As we progress, we will evolve our hombies to higher stages, which will allow them to think again to accomplish more complex tasks.
The builder aspect is not to be outdone, because in addition to building rooms dedicated to our various tasks (research, wood treatment, electricity production, etc.), we will have to create defenses to protect ourselves from zombie attacks, especially violent at night. No violence and gore on the other hand on ZCL, since we will just freeze them with snow cannons, to place them in a dedicated room while waiting to treat them! The game looks really promising, with a humor that sometimes made me think of Two Point games. Can't wait to get your hands on early access, still planned for this end of the year!
