Thank you United Independent Entertainment for sending a copy of this game to review.

Industry Giants 2 is a simulator game ripped straight out of the '90s. It originally came out in 2002 and this is the Steam port I'm reviewing. You choose an industry and control the supply chain from raw materials to retail stores. You move through time in the 20th century and have to manage weather, city growth, and technological advances. There are several campaigns to advance through with specific goals as well as an endless mode where you choose how you want to play. 

There is no escaping the fact that this game originally came out in 2002. With that in mind the graphics are exactly what you'd expect. It has the classic "high" resolution intro video and then in-game it has Sim City 3000 style buildings and landscapes. All the colors in the game are muted, from the landscapes to the cities; there's also not a lot of variety in the buildings. I couldn't tell you what any of the buildings in the cities are for, except ones I built. The sound effects are entirely too loud. My only solution to this problem was to turn the sound FX slider to just above mute and keep the music slider at medium. However with this setting I'm forced to listen to the fairly repetitive, low quality synth music. More egregious is that the sound effects and music do not pause if you pause the game. More than once I found myself being startled by an errant bird call or a jackhammer. The worst part is that whenever a new technological advancement becomes available it plays a short video where the volume is super loud. I nearly jumped out of my seat when I was crunching numbers on expanding my farming system and a fog horn sounded, announcing the arrival of bigger cargo ships. 

I enjoyed the campaigns; there's a good variety of objectives that really force you to examine the most efficient way to build your empire. The title suggests it's a business simulator, but the features are limited almost entirely to the supply chain and transportation. If you're looking for a Business Tycoon type experience you'll be disappointed. The game does give you more than enough information to manage your supply chain. There are tables, charts, and graphs for all aspects of your burgeoning industry. Players will likely spend most of their time in endless mode. Instead of getting a specific goal and date range, like in the campaigns, you select a map, start at the year 1900 and build out however you want. There are a ton of maps in endless mode so you could easily lose 100s of hours here if you want. 

The controls felt dated and took some getting used to. You're told to scroll around the map by moving the mouse to the sides of the screen, but I had issues scrolling to the right because my 2nd monitor would cause the mouse to leave the game. Later I found that using the arrow keys was more consistent. There were some features that weren't explained well or at all in the tutorial. For instance the game doesn't tell you that you can slow down and speed up time with use of the "+" and "-" keys. It mentions the vehicles window, but doesn't tell you that you can manage all your vehicles from there. Using that window is so much easier than scrolling around and clicking each individual vehicle, which the tutorial instructs you to do.

No feature is more dated than the multiplayer. The game offers skirmish mode, LAN play and "internet game". The skirmish mode works fine and is pretty fun. Here you can play against up to 3 other AI players. I only played a couple games, but having another competing industry adds a nice dynamic. The local multiplayer does function, but I haven't tested it myself, although I've read forums posts and seen a video that it works. The "internet game" option uses GameSpy. I have heard about this service, but not for a long time. So I found a place to download GameSpy. I installed it, but when I went to make an account I got a 404 error. It turns out GameSpy was shut down in 2014, so "internet game" is useless. 

If you have any nostalgia for 90s tycoon games then you'll enjoy Industry Giants 2. The game doesn't boast a ton of features, but what it does offer is done well. Players who are inexperienced with these types of games may be thrown off by the dated graphics and controls. The game is appropriate for all ages. The only moral quandaries I found is that the game does encourage greedy behaviors, such as a mission where you are essentially a banana republic dictator. There are tons of different missions to choose from and paths to take in endless mode giving the game a huge amount of replayability.