Sea Port Tycoon 2024

Genre: Idle Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Sea Port Tycoon 2024, released on Nintendo Switch in 2024, is an Idle Game where players manage shipping operations at a port to try to maximize profits, upgrading various vehicles and facilities to make them more effective and profitable. Most of this game’s controls only work via the touchscreen, so you won’t really be able to play this game in docked mode.

The presentation in Sea Port Tycoon 2024 uses simple 3D visuals from an isometric view, backed by repetitive acoustic guitar music that doesn’t really fit the game’s theme, but more or less meshes with the Idle Game tone. There’s nothing especially interesting going on here, but it more or less works… save for one glaring issue.

As I noted above, this game can’t really be played in docked mode. However, much of the text in this game is absolutely tiny, including readouts of costs you need to pay to buy upgrades. Not only is this illegible text important for making decisions about what to buy, but mistakenly trying to buy it brings up an error message that refuses to clear for a few seconds. It’s really infuriating to think you can afford something based on your best guess at what the tiny text says, only to be punished with an error screen you can’t get rid of.

Making matters even worse, the game’s menus don’t work properly. Some buttons refuse to be pressed at all, instead thinking that you’re trying to scroll the game’s camera. And even the buttons that do work require you to have really precise finger placement when pushing the tiny button.

Even if everything in this game actually worked as intended, this game would still have issues with how poorly it communicates to the player how everything works. How do you tell what’s holding up operations when it takes a while to get cash? How does the holding capacity of vehicles affect things? How do you earn more of resources other than cash?

I could see Sea Port Tycoon 2024 being an enjoyable Idle Game if all of its problems were fixed, but those problems are so damning that it’s hard for me to see any merit in this game. The combination of the touchscreen requirement, teenie-tiny text, and error messages you can’t get rid of seems like it was deliberately designed to infuriate players, and even being generous means basically assuming that the game’s creator never actually played their game on Nintendo Switch. You should do the same and not play this game.

tl;dr – Sea Port Tycoon 2024 is an Idle Game about managing a sea port, but it can only be played in handheld mode using a touchscreen, the text is frequently too small to read, the game uses error messages that stay up for a few seconds, some touchscreen buttons don’t work at all, the game’s mechanics are poorly-explained… this game is an absolute mess, and you should stay away from it.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Game

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