Cocaine Dealer is an early access title that shows promise, and with the generally low cost ($4 USD at the time of this review), is a pretty low risk venture for those of you looking to build a virtual criminal empire. While it’s rather bare bones at the moment, the developer has thus far been active in pushing updates and bug fixes.
As far as graphics go, there’s not a whole lot that’s going to draw your attention; this is a management sim at heart. The vast majority of your time is going to be spent balancing meters – your stamina, your workers’ stamina, your reputation, police heat, and your bankroll. While some of you might find some sort of zen factor in slowly scraping coke off of your pile and onto the scale, you’ll soon find it’s more efficient to dedicate one or more of your crew to do it for you.
The sound effects are minimal, consisting of your cellphone vibrating (from customers making orders), a police siren, and a single-track hiphop loop. Even fans of the genre are going to want to mute the music eventually, and while I understand why it exists, the repetitive loop eventually just becomes annoying. (You can’t do this in-game. You can only do it from the title screen, just as an FYI.)
As you grow your wealth and reputation, you can buy cars, houses, and apparel which affect your reputation, and there’s also a mechanic for hiding or flushing your stash, but the loop never changes, or even really evolves at this stage of the game’s development. You do get more frequent phone calls from people looking for increasingly large amounts of cocaine, and gain new dealers who sell in greater quantity, but that’s all. Literally what you do at the beginning of the game is exactly what you’ll be doing hours later, just with slightly larger numbers.
I’m interested to see where it goes from here, and I’d encourage anyone to invest in this early access title if they think it sounds interesting, but just be aware that features are rather lean at this point. It’s more enjoyable in short bursts of play, as opposed to any extended gaming session.
Click here to purchase Cocaine Dealer
The Chuck is a lifelong gamer who was born in Ohio, but now lives in much closer proximity to Mickey Mouse.
The Chuck has found his life to be a series of improbable and almost unbelievable events, starting when he was twenty and caught the bubonic plague from a prairie dog. He was as surprised as anyone when he found out that's something that can happen.
When he isn't gaming, The Chuck can be found enjoying baseball, (American) football, pro wrestling, and horror movies. He is most commonly seen in the company of one or more cats.
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