Copa City Review Explores An Ambitious Football Logistics Simulator Sidelined By Technical Instability and Repetitive Management
For years now, sports simulation has really only offered up two options for the discerning player. You can control the individual players on the field in an action game, or you can pull the strings of the players behind the scenes as a manager. Copa city, though, tries to make a bit of an in between managing a football stadium doesn't include focusing on transfers and set plays, it requires the kind of Herculean logistical task of putting together a top tier football event. You aren't playing for the team, you are playing for the city. You are an unseen force who must ensure tens of thousands of fans can get fed, get liquored, get pumped up and safely make their way to a football stadium prior to kick off.
This isn't you taking corner kicks, this is you taking corner office supplies. Copa city, puts you in the role of an ex professional footballer who has transformed into a logistical master known as the “City Captain”. You take real life locations like Warsaw, Berlin, Rio and transform them into buzzing fan centers for match day. You'll even be managing games from some truly heavy hitting clubs like Arsenal, Bayern, and Flamengo due to the game's official licensing agreements. Your overall mission involves managing a metric called “Match Readiness” through an accelerated in game timeframe where you must purchase urban grids, manage marketing efforts for global fan importation, construct appropriate fan areas, and then after gates open, strategically divvy up stadium seating, keep rival fans apart, and establish marching paths to the arena.
It would, on paper, be phenomenal to have an event management tycoone game in the high energy environment of football. However, in copa city, the execution simply isn't up to par. The issues begin right in the early stages.
The game’s tutorial is an almost hour long exercise in tedium, feel less like a video game introduction and more like a company training.
Then when you're actually free, you quickly realize that the main gameplay loop is incredibly repetitive. You are managing three types of people Families (who want circus entertainment), Core Fans (who like tons of catered food), and Ultras ( who want plenty of security) by fitting small buildings and the generators into a cramped layout on the city grid. Instead of it being like any of the great city builders, it feels more like a very expensive spreadsheet where you click down on a food cart, watch a tiny bar filling up very slowly and do it over and over.
Even if you are willing to turn a blind eye towards the rather tedious mechanics, Copa City simply makes playing the game a painful ordeal to endure owing to a hostile User Interface (UI) and severe technical problems. The game’s User Interface design has to be one of the most difficult I have ever experienced, with navigating your city’s map an exercise in frustration and confusion, to say the least. Your job of locating specific districts involves painstakingly wading through convoluted tactical menus, while the game fails to offer sufficient explanations for its many inexplicable mechanics.
Placing an object with, according to the game, a “fun” value somewhere within a suggested region may inexplicably have the opposite effect, plunging your public approval into a seemingly unending void.
To pile more fuel onto the already raging inferno, from unresponsibly malfunctioning controller inputs that requires a full program re launch to mission terminating progress stoppers where an object simply refuses to snap onto an item’s grid, the game is unfortunately in a deplorable, game breaking state. Add on the fact that the game comes with very repetitive and often contextually inept voiced characters, coupled with a blurry text display, the game’s level of immersion goes for a toss.
Pc Version Tested.
Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from Devs
