Recycling Center Simulator Review (PC)

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t spent countless hours trying to get through to my daughter—a seven year old who, like many other children, fails to understand the importance of recycling basic materials and, in a lot of cases, how an old pizza box can have a drastic effect on the environment if allocated in an appropriate way. In most of these situations, I’ve often been led to separate the general waste from the reusable parts in my own “way” — not because I want to, but because deep down, I too would like to do my part for the well-being of the planet. But to be paid for such things? Eh, that’s something only the local waste collectors can brag about. Them, and, well, a digital copy of me, funnily enough. And that, believe it or not, is why I’m grateful for games like Recycling Center Simulator.

In case you missed the memo, here’s everything you need to know: Balas Games has just launched a brand-new first-person management and business simulation game. The game in question—a title that pretty much sports a lot of the same bells and whistles as, well, most rags-to-riches tales set in a, shall we say, mundane visual representation of a real-life trade—invites you to embark on your own quest for private gain in a simple yet weirdly satisfying loop of collecting, upgrading, and ultimately discovering new and innovate ways to curve the boundaries between economic growth and productivity. The only major difference here, of course, is that you aren’t tasked with making money off the fat of the land, but rather, the leftover household waste from the communal land. Joy.

Interested in picking up a copy of Recycling Center Simulator? Then allow us to fill you in on the details.

Waste Not, Want Not

Recycling Center Simulator lays the groundwork for a relatively straightforward A-to-B routine: you begin your shift with an offer—a scrap deal that consists of a rather shoddy location, and a whole heap of trash. Once you’ve successfully managed to barter with your client—a process that sees you submitting bids until both parties reach an agreement—you simply venture out to the location via a nifty teleportation system, and get to work on gathering the items to transport back to your hub. After that, the goal is all rather simple: load the items in your inventory onto a conveyor belt, and start sorting through the items so that they essentially belong to one of several categories, i.e. metal, plastic, and so on and so forth. From there, it’s merely the case of collecting your materials, and fashioning new objects to offload in the general market. So, again — simple.

The game itself is spread across a series of mini-games—tasks in which you either manually traverse a vacant room and collect items, or sift through various materials until you’ve filled a selection of bags. Aside from the general collection of trash and tools, the game also sees you building up your empire—again, a goal that mostly consists of unlocking machines to build better items, and employing hard-working staff to complete all sorts of duties to make your role as overseer a little less demanding. There’s a little more to it than that, for sure, but for the most part, you’re either collecting on your deals, or shoveling through a collection of upgrades and other cataloged perks. Is it a formula we’ve seen before? Yes — a thousand times, yes. And yet, that doesn’t change the fact that, repetition cast aside, there’s still a whole lot of fun to it.

Don’t Be Wasteful

Naturally, the game sees you climbing a ladder of sorts, in the form that, you begin with little more to your name than a bit of spare change, a barebones factory floor, and a couple of helping hands to help you juggle the day-to-day tasks. Like a lot of other business management sims (and these are plentiful, we’ll say that much), you make gradual progress in your endeavors by accepting contracts from your trusty laptop—a vital component in your arsenal that allows you to source fresh jobs, and essentially evolve your kingdom into a fully sustainable business model. At the core of all of this, though, there’s a simple formula that just about anyone could comprehend: collect, analyze, and reproduce. Simply put, you earn a paycheck, and you start over, only with a few more machines, and a bit of extra change to pour into one of several assets.

I’ll put my hands up and say this: sorting through trash can prove to be a bit of a soul-crushing job — so much, that it’s often hard to lose sight of your worth as you voluntarily take on the same responsibilities day in, day out. The only saving grace to all of this, of course, is that there are stepping stones to help you realize your potential as a fledgling trash guru. Even still, there is really only so much that you can unlock throughout your journey to ascend the ranks, after which progression soon becomes a little jaunted and, eventually, flat. And that’s the thing with Recycling Center Simulator: it just sort of hits a brick wall and eventually stops knowing what to do with itself. Sure, you can continue to amass additional revenue, but without any post-career milestones to surpass, it’s a somewhat pointless investment to chase.

Work, Work, Work

Graphically, Recycling Center Simulator isn’t anything particularly special. Matter of fact, it touts just about every single cardboard cutout-like aspect that we’ve seen numerous times before in other business management iterations. And that isn’t a bad thing, per se, though I wouldn’t go as far as to say that there’s anything to write home about here, either. The audio, too, isn’t exactly filled with any quirky effects or thematic elements; on the contrary, it’s more or less restricted to the absolute basics—a few simplistic sounds, and not to mention the occasional menu prompt effect, rather disappointingly. For these reasons, it’s sort of hard to praise several of the finer aspects of Recycling Center Simulator. It isn’t that they’re bad — it’s just that they’re a little forgettable and bland, to say the least.

When all’s said and done, it doesn’t take much to come to grips with how poor the visual and audio effects are likely to be when it comes to these sorts of run-of-the-mill simulation games. Having said that, so long as there’s something of a compelling gameplay hook to make up for such shortcomings, it doesn’t really matter all that much. As for whether or not you could say that Recycling Center Simulator has such captivating nodes in its world, however, is more a matter of personal preference than anything else. And honestly, I’m on the fence about it.

Verdict

I want to say that I immediately fell head over heels in love with the primitive nature of sweeping trash and allocating metals and plastics to certain places and what have you, but the truth is, it wasn’t a natural-born love that I could capitalize on without having to subject myself to hours of monotonous block-building work beforehand. And there was a lot of that. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the fact that I could gradually ascend a semi-corporate ladder and explore new ways to upgrade my business model, but, in a similar fashion as a lot of other simulation games, such a steady progression eventually led to a series of repetitive chores that I could’ve done without. What’s more, as I managed to finalize the routine after fifteen hours, it also meant that, with little else to explore or purchase, there was nothing left to do.

I’m not going to say that Recycling Center Simulator is a bad game — because it isn’t. On the contrary, it’s actually one of the most enjoyable rags-to-riches business management-type games that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. But then, such simple pleasures often come at a price: a sacrifice of time, effort, and not to mention a natural tendency to witness small bursts of joy creep through hours upon hours of hard work. And that’s just it: there are several achievements to chase here, including but not limited to a genuine sense of pride that ties in with an honest day’s work. It’s finding the patience to stick it out to the end, that’s the key. And I think I can speak for everyone when I say, you know — not everyone will have that motivation to persevere.