If games were decided by a committee, manufactured by a person wearing a hard hat at a printing press and a conveyor belt spat the games out at the other end then developer A2 Softworks and publishers Manager Game S.A. and Red Dev Studio S.A. have nailed it. Drill Deal: Oil Tycoon is a boring and soulless game that will only appeal to those that like the taste of Clag Paste on their toast.

Drill Deal: Oil Tycoon is a base-building, business simulator that has you running operations on an oil rig. There is no story in this game, but you are provided with a tutorial, eight scenarios, and a sandbox mode.

The tutorial is very extensive. It explains and provides tasks for you to accomplish so you can grasp the fundamentals of the game. As you complete the tasks provided it will inform you of other features about the game but provide no example. With the lack of examples, the tutorial is only good to show you where to find things and what their function is. The overall mechanics and how they work are left up to you. This, unfortunately, will have you in future games struggling to make progress and spending hours fumbling about until the light bulb above your head turns on.

Each scenario will give you three tasks to complete awarding you a star. The tasks vary from scenario to scenario and this in turn slowly unlocks more and more options in your research tree. This way you are eased into all the buildings, their functions, and upgrades. Again though it is up to you to learn what everything does as no detailed explanation is given.

The sandbox mode is what you’d come to expect and is completely standard in all its aspects. You can set parameters you want. From difficulty, event frequency, currency, and more you have free reign on how to play and how to build your oil rig. This mode however is locked behind the first two scenarios. You are also required to get three stars in both those scenarios.

All these modes however suffer from one of two major flaws depending on if you are playing in docked mode or hand-held mode. While in docked mode the game’s menu navigation is so poor it feels like it’s fighting against you. Entering the radial wheel to access your menus to build, upgrade or purchase items is easy enough. In fact, it needs to be easy as you will be opening the wheel constantly. After making some choices you will need to reopen the radial wheel and go back into that menu to confirm your decision.

Confirming some of those choices will be just as difficult as some menus do not highlight correctly so you will be guessing if you have the correct section selected. I assume that this problem occurs from the change in resolution between the docked and hand-held format.

In hand-held mode, the screen becomes too small to see details like icons and text. Granted you will be able to navigate the menus fluidly, you will be left squinting at the screen asking yourself “What the hell is that”? The hand-held mode also is incapable of running in fast-forward mode for an extended period causing the game to crash. The crashes can also wipe your progress taking you back to the beginning of the game.

Finally, in either docked or hand-held mode you will be also praying that no events happen whilst making your choices. The pop-up notifications will take priority knocking you out of what you’re doing forcing you to start navigating or confirming your choices again.

The voxel art style for your base is clean and functional. However, the water around your rig does not use the same art. Consequently, as the waves writhe, your boats are just swallowed up instead of bobbing along. The music and ambient sounds are crisp but played at nausea. Saving your sanity will have you turning them down or off.

If you are looking for a base-building, business simulator then Drill Deal: Oil Tycoon will give you exactly what you’re looking for. There is nothing new to be found here, nor any innovation in the genre.

This is not a bad thing, however, Drill Deal: Oil Tycoon can not be recommended as a purchase on the Nintendo Switch. Other games are offering a similar experience and do not suffer from Drill Deal: Oil Tycoon’s problems. If you want to play Drill Deal: Oil Tycoon, playing on a different platform would be recommended.

Written by: Ashley Barnett-Cosgrove