This game should be called - WAREHOUSES.

I know this is a remake of a much older game but they could have at least made the graphics or interface more up to date... Granted that there are so many things to do but at the end of the day, the graphics are too dull and how exciting can it get trying to arrange every industry and its components to be within catchment area of a Warehouse that is within the catchment area of a store. You don't need roads between them... just be within the catchment area. Way too realistic.

I didn't like this game. The reason being that I thought it was the same type of game as the Railroad Tycoon series but the Railroad Tycoon series did a much better job of making the game fun and challenging to play. This game didn't offer the same freedom when building and trying to get a station close enough to a storage building which was close enough to a store could really be frustrating.

Great game, but requesting a refund. In 2 hours I've had multiple crashes and the tooltips don't display correctly (garbled font). Shame, there's not many games like this available!

An excellent economic management game. Highly recommended for fans of the genre.

First, I should mention that I originally played this game years ago and so I'm somewhat biased due to nostalgia. Even so, I've spent quite a few hours with it in 2016 and I think it's still a very good game.

The gameplay consists of managing production chains. You have factories that make stuff, railways (and ships and trucks and planes) that move stuff, warehouses that store stuff before it's sold, and stores that sell stuff. Cities have limited demand for each individual product, so you can't just produce lots of one of them. There are over 200 products, and typically you'll be producing several at any one time. What you can produce depends on what raw materials you have access to. (And if playing a mission, what the restrictions are. If 200+ products sounds overwhelming, playing the missions helps.) The basic raw materials are wood, oil, various ores and various farm products. Wood can only be harvested from forests, oil and ores from relevant deposits, and farms require good soil. Different plants and animals thrive in different conditions, so for example a dry map will let you grow the likes of peanuts and cotton, whereas a wet map will let you grow wheat and corn and potatoes and tomatoes and such.

The challenge mostly lies in choosing what to invest in. Once a production chain is set up, it's rare to not make a profit, but the size of that profit can vary greatly. Setting up production chains is usually quite expensive, so if you make bad choices at the start, you'll likely end up not making enough money to invest in anything else, and thus fail the mission or fall behind in endless play.

The second challenge is transportation. It's possible to avoid building any, as warehouses have a short range in which they transfer goods automatically. This is one of the major strategic decisions you'll face - do you go for a less profitable chain entirely built close to the customers, thus skipping transports, or do you go for a more profitable chain that requires transportation? What type of transportation to use is also an important consideration.

One of the main strong points of the game is how consistently a chain works once set up. You don't really have to micromanage, other than occasionally adding production capacity to account for increased demand due to cities growing larger over time. This means you can focus on actually growing your business while the existing parts of it work fine without constant oversight. There are 2 semi-exceptions. First, there are variations in climate that can increase or decrease agricultural production for a few years. You should account for this by having some surplus warehouse capacity, so excess production from good harvests can cover insufficient production from bad harvests. Second, some products get replaced as technology marches on, so you'll have to adjust or replace chains as necessary when that happens. For example, deep freezers lose their popularity once refrigerators are invented.

There's actually a third semi-exception. The amount of available ores and oil is finite, and the mines and oil wells don't cover the entire deposit, so you'll need to demolish and rebuild them every once in a while to cover a different part of the deposit, then finally move them to a new deposit once the first runs out, which also requires replacing infrastructure. And if you manage to exhaust ALL the deposits, that's it, no more of that raw material. In practice, this won't be much of a problem in actual gameplay unless you go for very long games in endless mode, but I still found it annoying enough to mod it out.

And speaking of modding, quite a lot can be modded. You'll need the file "Industry Giant 2\config\Config.gen". Make a backup, open it with Notepad, copy everything inside and paste it in a blank excel sheet. This lets you actually see what the different values do. When you figure out what you want to change, open Config.gen with Notepad again and find the values there. Credit goes to Turel97 for teaching me this.

Two issues I have with the game that I modded out are the extremely short coverage area of shops, which means it can take a ridiculously large amount of them to cover a large city (and there are many different types of shops!), and the negative effects industries have on city growth. The latter is nonsensical, as industries provide jobs, and nobody moves to a city with sky high unemployment. So I modded all the non-polluting industries to give postive, not negative growth, and decreased the growth bonus of shops to compensate, as it was overly high by default.

In conclusion, this game achieves something of a holy grail of economic games - it lets you set up production chains that require minimal micromanagement, and what few frustrating issues it has can easily be modded away. Add to that a map editor and enough content already in the game to keep you interested for many dozens of hours and you get one of the best economic management games ever created.

not working properly on Windows 10
dont buy it.

Title: Industry Giant II
Developer: Fancy Bytes & Reactor
Publisher: United Independent Entertainment
Genre: Economic Simulator

Industry Giant II was initially released in 2002 but found its way onto Steam in 2015. And it is a fortunate thing too, since it’s still one of the most complex (even if the graphics themselves are aged) industrial simulations for PC. Everything from the gathering of raw materials, processing them into finished products and supplying them to their intended retail outlets, is very well simulated within this game. Where it lacks in eye candy, it makes up for in the gameplay mechanics and especially the ever shifting economy. The cities on the maps develop at an equal pace to your (hopefully) successful business plans and the means of transportation for the goods you produce are also nicely represented through many age appropriate choices. You have a well designed campaign featuring a scaling challenge which serves as a great tutorial at the same time, for the open-ended levels you will enjoy the most. This title’s educational value is beyond a shadow of doubt.

+ Steam Achievements.
+ Complex economic simulation.

- Simple graphics regardless of the self-proclaimed HD makeover.
- No Steam Trading Cards.

Rating 7/10

This review was submitted for Cubbes.

no multiplayer?

+1

As long as you get it at less than 5€ (got my copy at 2). Anything more is a rip-off (given the age of the product).

Remembered this game from the old days. Haven't been able to play it for a while due to the original not working on modern hardware. Grabbed this while on a Steam sale. Works fine so far. No issues. i5-750, nVidia 650, Win10 64bit.
Much better than Transport Giant.

I realize this is a re-release of an older game but it feels very much like a phone style game that does not belong on Steam. It is not quite up to snuff for the style of Management games I have grown accustom to. With a $10 price tag I expect something slightly more modern and updated. This is not worth more than $1 or so in my opinion, so no, I cannot recommend it.

This is my opinion, if you do not like it move on. I will delete any fanboy comments.