The game begins with a pretty solid opening, yes it all feels very ‘assety’ – par for the course with a lot of ‘simulator’ type games – but the Southern American drawl that acts as your mission co-ordinator comes over the radio and tells you that you need to get into a transport cart and head on over to an enormous structure to prepare it for silicon ore mining. Leaving the vehicle shed, there is an incredible sense of scale as you flick through the radio stations on offer and trundle across the empty desert ground to the excavation machine, first fixing a hose, then moving lining it up for the mining, drilling, filling up the haulage truck, and finally getting the ore out of the complex. Played mostly in first person perspective, with various cameras selectable when on a vehicle / machine, the sounds of construction work really well, with each machine having a real sense of weight and power to them. It’s when you want to actually ‘move’ them that the real problems come into play.
