Arms Dealer

Another EA failure, plans well beyond a devs ability, so quits when the going gets tough with a lame excuse, oh and thanks for the cash MUGS.

Let me put this as politely as i can....this is crap.

The devs promised the community way more than they could or would have ever been willing to deliver and this basically is not a game. I purchased this on good faith in beta some time ago because the idea of this type of game seemed awesome and i've been waiting for more to happen with it but the team behind it has basically abondoned it entirely, taken their money and run. This pile of garbage is why i now refuse to support games in beta for the most part. Myself and all those other people who were excited about this idea got absolutely and utterly screwed. This had a ton of promise and didn't just fall short, it never really began.

If anyone from Steam is reading this, do the community a favour and remove this. It's nothing but trash.

If you're a prospective customer who's interested in this, you've been warned.

I really want to like this game....I really do.

Arms dealer's concept is one you really don't see fleshed out much (if ever) in gaming, despite the neat idea, the game's original release was....questionable to put it politely.

For those interested in economic simulators (Such as Patrician, The Guild or similar titles), its a similar premise...however this is hands-down THE most tedious User Interface (or UI) that i've ever come up against. In order to conduct a single sale (before you can automate whatsoever) you must do the following for every transaction:

If its in a new country, Open country
Open contacts
Bribe
Open the Buy/sell window
Find and purchase desired weapons in that country
Open Smug(gle)
Choose "Private travel"
Select Vehicle
Determine route
Select Cargo(s) to be carried in that vehicle
Review
Confirm
Wait for it to arrive
Repeat first 3 steps if its a new country you haven't accessed before
Open Buy-sell
Sell weapons
Repeat the vehicle movement steps (7-12) back to where the rest of your weapons are stored (if you couldn't fit the entire shipment in the vehicle)

Repeat this entire set of steps ad nauseum.

I don't mind a bit of repetition in games like this, frankly its to be expected, but what makes this so tedious also isn't JUST all of these steps, but that half of (if not more) your screen is covered by these windows, with several minimizing automatically between steps as well so you have to re-open them to continue the process.

On the 16th of this month (May 2017) It will have been a full year since the Developer posted anything after making promises of a free remake of the title for those whom have already purchased it. More than a few folks have expressed their distaste with the developer and frankly I can't help but join them.

I REALLY REALLY want to like this game, but its less a treat to play and more of a chore.

I REALLY wanted to like this game, and I tried it before and was frustrated with the UI and the tutorial so I stopped, then I decided to try it again, and it was still clunky and not intuitive AT ALL. I think it is a great concept, but they tried to do too much at once and instead of having a few really great core mechanics to build on we were left with a whole bunch of poorly done mechanics that may have been great ideas, but executed poorly. I am hoping that the dev will continue with updates and maybe polish the game some, because it really does have a TON of potential. However, in the current state I would not recommend this game to anyone.

I'm not one to badmouth other people and i've never gave a negative review in my life, but consumers deserve to hear the truth about this game, since I cannot stress enough how you must AVOID this game like the plague.

I gave this Jason Huskie a fair chance and told myself withhold a launch review to judge this game by the end of the year when all bugs and mistakes were out of the game.

None of this has happened.


At first, I was charmed by the concept of an Arms Dealer game and the promises of the developer to listen to the community. That is the reason I was one of the first people to buy this game at launch and help the developer to actually make a succesful and worthwhile game (explains the number of hours i've put into this shit game)

The people were BEGGING for a tutorial or even a hint on what this game was about, but Jason Huskie said "no, this is like a Paradox Interactive game. It is too deep to compress into a tutorial or explanation. Everybody that ISN'T complaining has fun with the game!"

No, everybody else 1) gave you a chance 2) stopped caring. even you, Jason Huskie, stopped caring by not even bothering with your "Community" approach and just dump this game in a hole in the grond like the deformed baby it is.

The score says enough about the quality of this fecal storm.

I cannot expres my anger, frustration and disappointment by the shear ARROGANCE of the most shitty dev/publisher (Jason Huskie) of 2015 (there, i've said it. THE MOST SHITTY GAME I'VE PLAYED ALL YEAR).

Would have to say No on this game, as the Tutorial only shows you the basics of the game, it does not teach you how to auto trade or talk to other gun runner, or agencies. thus you have alot of achievment in which you want to complet but simply cannot because you do not know how to.

My main gripe is the auto trade, i have tried to figure it and have looked on youtube and read some of the forums on how maybe how to do it, so with that said I am left to Micor manage one friggen Vehicle, with so much of the same, go here buy this go there sell that, fly back to here blah blah blah. so score 4/10 in my book. Needs work and maybe a better tutorial or some extra vids on how to certain things. LIKE AUTO TRADE,

OK this game, my opinion, this game is a great concept, it sounds fun, it sounds like you can spend a lot of time on it. When i started playing, the UI just doesnt work, its awful. The gameplay, well its not bad but its just let down by lazyness, the devs of this are so lazy and awful, almost 2 months and only a few bug fixes, if the devs got there finger out it would be allright, but simply just a cash grab at this stage.

Pros:Great idea, not bad gameplay, interesting idea in the game other than the main idea, a story that isnt totally rubbish and some interesting guns to buy and sell.
Cons:The visuals are terrible, so bad, the UI is utter shit, the game stutters so much, lots of pictures are not there, gameplay is very very slow at first. Also the countries are so unrealistic its funny.

So, this game is a good idea, an untapped market dare i say, but executed so badly, the devs are so lazy and just awful, i heop they read this and realise what a cash grab this is, im allready getting a refund for this, i wanted to like it but its just too unfinished, also claming this is a finished game, no just no.

Great premises, but really strange result...

First, the game is not worthing the 12$ for which is currently sold.
Actually the game is nice to play, but there is really nothing to keep you playing it for more than a couple of hours!

Really, can be considered a game a product where you actually only buy for less and sell for more?
Because, it's all you can actually do in the current game!

There is the graphic, the base for a nice game... and the possibility to create something more, but at the end, at the actual state, the game can be worth something around 3-4 $, not more.

I really don't understand why the developers had thrown away a good opportunity to create something really worthing of 12 $, they were close, I think.

But no, for now it's a simple product and actually a pretty boring one!

Okay well let me say firstly these are just my first impressions, the game is very new and I've not got many hours on it so some of this stuff may be inaccurate.
Arms Dealer is in my opinion a very good game with a lot of promise-and with future patches and such I can see it being a very complex sim that you can sink hours into. However right now at this moment it seems very shallow.
So let me explain a bit.

Arms Dealer is a business sim where you whizz around the world selling weapons illegally trying to beat the competition and stay ahead of the law while getting $tack Bundle$ of dolla dolla.
So let me focus on some of the actual buisness and economic aspects of the game seeing as they are it's core mechanics.
Well it all seems a bit two dimensional and areas that could be incredibly deep seem very vauge and not properly explained or disfunctional.

Firstly- supply and demand. Basic economic principles. Certain countries are called Arms Suppliers, and they, suprisingly, supply you with guns. Nations like France, Switzerland, the Uk, Russia, China and the USA and a few others. Each supply thier own national models of firearm and they differ in price based upon assumed quality (though this isn't an ingame value and it abstracted rather crudly I feel to simply "PRICE" reflecting it's supposed quality)
Every other country in the world is an arms buyer. Yup thats right- except for maybe 8 or 9 nations no-one else is selling or making any sort of firearm in the world. No-one.
You can't even buy surplus stock of other countries weapons from them. This seems a little unrealistic seeing as countries like Syria, Iran and others are major suppliers of weaponry. Secondly, over-abundance of supply seems to have little or no effect on price. I sold 265 crates of grenade launchers to the Netherlands during thier War with Ukraine (thus taking those weapons off the market effectivly as i bought up all of Russia's supply of them)
However a few in-game days later I returned to Russia, the supply had magically regenerated so i bought them all again and went back to The Netherlands and sold them for the exact same price. Now I know weapons break and degrade ect but within an in-game week and half I had sold a massive $400,000,000 worth of Grenade launchers to the Netherlands which would be fine. Except I basically flooded thier market with them and just raked in massive profits. Surely someone at Netherlands HQ (tm) was sat thier doing stock take thinking "fuck we have a lot of Grenade launchers we don't really need to pay much for them anymore" and why was no-one in Russia going "fuck Grenade Launchers are popular lets double the price"
It broke the game and was a simple exploit. In a month of back and forth trading I made 1.2 BILLION and jumped from being the worlds number 100 arms dealer to 18th. It's not really providing any depth or challenge is it? And this is all before The Agentcy (the law enforcers baisically) even were aware I existed. In fact they didn't try to activly stop me until i reached 11th on the table.

After that it was easy sailing, I could go to any country I wanted and buy up thier entire stock and sell it all en-mass to The Netherlands and make huge profits. All this time I didn't sell a single gun to Ukraine, but this didn't seem to affect the war at all. No there are potentially 99 other arms dealers in game, (but so far I've only happened to chance upon 1 of them while I was chillin in Cuba waiting to make the trip to the USA.) So maybe they sold the Ukraine guns but that data, if it exists, isn't easy to find. In fact I didn't find it. So I have no idea. But surely selling almost the entire arms producing worlds stock to one country would end the war pretty quickly?

So to spice things up a bit I decide to become a war maker. The game has a feature called Black Umbrella where you can manipulate nations into going to war with each other. But this seems overly complex and abstracted, I didnt; really know what I was doing except green numbers good, red numbers bad in creating war desire. It broke immersion a little bit, and it was also ridiculously easy. After making so much money from my arms dealing I could withstand the price of any of the triggers needed to start the war. 3 million is all it took to make Ethiopia and Poland go to war, I make double that in a single Russia-Netherlands Grenade Launcher run these days.
Ethiopia and Poland. WTF. How would that even work? Geo-politics doesn't seem to exist in Arms Dealer on a sort of level. You also cannot make Arms Suppliers go to war, despite the USA, Russia, China and Israel being probably the most likely countries to get into a war.

There seems to be a bit of an attempt at alliances though with COMAX, NATO and NA opinions changing of you with every purchase and sale but frankly this all seems a little pointless. I have no idea who is in any of these factions beyond simple guesswork as faction lists don't exist or if they do I couldn't find them and no tool tips existed to tell me where to look. No do I have any idea what they affect. At first I thought price. Russia is probably COMAX and Netherlands is probably NATO, but the prices of Russian weapons didn't change nor did the quantity despite the massive sales and -6000 COMAX opinion i was generating on each trip. So I have no idea if thats a bug or what.

So thats a lot of negatives and you're probably wondering why I recomended this game. Well frankly it is a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the idea of using a freight ship to move hundreds of tonnes of munitions to Mexico and then manipulating them into a war with Finland and getting insanely rich. It's also very addictive and I stayed up way too late these last few nights thinking "I'll just do one more trip" or "I'll just make one more war"
Secondly, the potential for depth is there. With a more in-depth economic system and geo-political system this game could be fantastic. It could be highly complex with a very large challenge attached to it. So for the moment I'd say buy the game and enjoy it for what it is but pay attention to it and it may develop into something amazing.

EDIT: I'd also say that the dev's are really fast at trying to fix things which is a refreshing change given the current tidal wave of utter shiet that has swamped Steam lately. Permanently unfinished Early Acess games that sit vacant for months are strangling Steam and overcrowding it with medicority, the comitment of the devs is a true breath of fresh air.

Secondly a lot of people are complaining of bugs and crashes, i've not had any crashes or obvious bugs so far. The tutorial is very clunky though.

Rarely have i seen a team engaged so closely with the community!

The game itself is very interesting, and doesn't crash at all anymore (at least for me). Of course, it you don't like business sims, you won't like it. You play an arms dealer (duh) who is set to became the leader of its trade. You manipulate governments to escalate wars, track down the best deals, build your own logistic fleet to move the hardware around; all to make a neat profit. Of course, there is governmental agencies who tracks you down and bounty hunters to escape, and still more coming!!

On the other hand, the learning curve is not for everyone, i dont recommend to buy this if you like having you hand held through most of the game, or dont like making errors. You will learn from them, but it might cause you to lose at first.

Very good progress have been made by the developers to make the game worthy of a finished product, and they are still working on it very diligently. I may not show many playtime here, but i got the game from a certain place first, where the developers themselves wrote that " trial by torrent is a viable scenario, especially for indies. " which i agree completly. The simple fact that they took the time to post this made me buy the game right away; a company such as this deserves to be supported. I'm more than happy to help people who assume their errors, and go out of their way to make the best possible product, literally fixing bugs reported in the forum and then coming with a hotfix in the following hours. Keep up the good work, at this rythm, this rough but beautiful gem will become a marvelous jewel only asking to be discovered.

TL;DR

Pro:
+Great support from the developer
+Lots of regular updates and fixes, based on YOUR input
+Deep gameplay with various strategy

Con:
-Still a bit rough around the edge (missing icons, some clumsy menu, etc)
-Learning curve is not negligible, even with the (outdated) tutorial


Don't buy if you dont like indies, wait if you are not sure about the state of the game, or buy if you know like me that this underdog is much worth supporting; i'm already having great fun with it :)

Choke full of bugs and crashes alot. Too many GUI bugs where the clicks are not recognized and hangs alot. The concept for the game is so amazing. Just needs alot of polishing.

Updated Review
As requested by the developers in my comments I have now played the game again and I am updating my review accordingly. It's worth noting that this is written 9 days after the games release from Early Access - so supposedly a finished product.

The biggest change is that they have now fixed the fatal error bug that was making the game unplayable - I played the game for over 5 hours straight without a single crash. Crate auctions also now seem to work.

Unfortunately my assessment of the game remains the same, great idea, poorly implemented and now finally having been able to play it is my opinion that the gameplay itself lacks any substance.

Things that I believe are poorly implemented:
- The tutorial is awful, and even the biggest defenders of the game admit this. You can get the basics from it but its clunky.
- The UI / Menu system is also awful. Its particularly a problem for the tutorial where the tutorial instructions get obscured by pop up windows. In the actual game itself core functionality, such as saving, wanted lists, achivements / perks, missions / plot aren't accessible at all through a menu instead you need to use key bindings.
- One of the most common tasks you'll be doing in game is loading your transports with cargo and setting destinations and this is badly implemented, the interface for it is clunky and illogical requiring you to switch between a minimised window, but I also encountered a number of bugs where transports locations were incorrect i.e. listed as travelling when in fact in a country, and also when plotting the route only to find it thought the transport was in a different country. The pathing for the movement itself is also inconsistant e.g. its signigcantly quicker going from Russia to North Korea, than North Korea to Russia - as it takes a different route. Unless stationary your transports will more often than not appear as planes on the map, even after obviously traveling through a port and taking a sea route.
- There is no explanation of the target finder missions, and they are not built into the plot.
- The main story arc was broken for me when I purchased some discounted weapons but was intercepted causing me to automatically dump my stock so I couldnt complete the mission.
- The text e.g. "no longer for sell" is either written by someone who has English as a second language or... well lets not go there.
- It looks like a whole bunch of stuff that was planned hasn't yet been implemented in game i.e. reputation system doesn't seem to have any impact (and isn't explained anywhere), meeting demand doesn't impact sale price, wars don't seem to resolve as you'd expect, and a general lack of missions.
- There's a huge disconnect between sound and the game, what happens in game has no effect on sound at all that I could tell. Its just a sound track on loop alternating between things such as street noise and music. The only time sound comes into play is if you sit like an idiot and allow the countdown to a hunter catching you to get low.
- Not really important but as I made myself sit through it for the purposes of the review, the intro is the most boring and cliched crud I've ever come across. You sit there in complete silence for the intro too, it could have perhaps done with some voice acting, even if it was done badly by the dev team themselves.

Game play:
I played the game on normal difficulty and it was ridiculously easy. The forumla to progress is straight forward and repetive and offer no challenge or depth of strategy:
1. Buy interl for countries around Russia.
2. Repeatedly go back and forth between Russia (your starting location) and the country with the best sale price until you have enough money to upgrade your hull (capactity).
3. Complete the sale mission, and shortly after an order request.
4. This gives you enough money to may out your transport, buy another and bribe some generals.
5. At this point you'll have a couple of routes to choose from, and you just grind back and forth selling weapons to the same country listed on your intel.
6. Eventually you'll have enough cash to start a war. You can normally cause it to war with two otehr countries.
7. At this point you just go round to every supplier nation, buy everything up and then ship it to the warring nation.

That really is all there is to it. It quickly becomes repetitive and boring. The game could badly do with a complete overhaul of the story with the inclusions of missions to break up the grind. I enjoy games of this genre such as the orginal Uplink, but there's just not enough variety in Arms Dealer to keep it interesting for me. Some people clearly do enjoy it, maybe you'll be one of them.

I do have a huge problem with the developers of this game. They clearly made a choice to move from early access knowing that this would cause people such as myself to buy it. They then complain on the steam forums, direct quote:

"We do not ask for free positive review,how ever we do ask for you guys to be less eager at giving negative reviews, if theres something you dont like, hey post it here, we are almost 24/7 checking the forums,"

I think it illustrates a complete lack of respect for customers that they are pointing the finger at people reviewing a supposedly release ready game, when it was their eagerness to take our money that made them take it out of early access. They whine that EA didn't turn up all the bugs and necessary feedback to get the game right, and that they don't have money for "a room full of testers", not my problem I only care about the product I paid for. They've adopted an "everyone elses fault but ours" attitude, even blaming the Steam review system, whilst themselves trying to manipulate it by encouraging people to only leave positive reviews, saying planned DLC wont be free unless they get the needed sales. Hypocracy.

Original Review: Posted 28 March, 2 days after release of game from early access.
Avoid a FATAL ERROR - Do not buy

Great idea for a game, could have been amazing except someone got greedy and released it before it was anywhere near ready. In it's current state (supposed to be full release and not EA):

- Game crashes frequently giving a "FATAL ERROR" report, lots of people are reporting this on forums. Supposedly patched, but its still doing it just as frequently.
- No Save / load menu, you have to save games by pressing F5. You can only delete saves by quitting to the main menu, choose load and deleting from there.
- Its difficult to work out your most recent saved game after a crash because the values such as "play time" are all incorrectly set the same in the description.
- Assigned at least one mission with no explanation of how you got it or what you have to do. I'm referring specifically to the "target" mission you have upon starting the game.
- Some story missions fail to explain what you have to do sufficiently e.g. Country refreshes its stock. I completed it by accident.
- The family yacht is a plane.
- Winning crate auctions gets you nothing - guessing not implemented yet.

There will be plenty more but the game keeps crashing so I can't get to them to find out. Its a real shame, could have been awesome. I'm still going to persevere hoping they fix it.

Too many games like this eaither being released broken, or released from EA without meeting their promises. They are destroying their own industry.

I really liked the idea about this game, traveling around the world selling weapons to corrupt generals and starting wars for profit.
I had some fun plaing this game but there are serious errors that make the game hard to play and ruins a lot of the fun.

But after one hour playtime the game crashed and i had to start over again, then i thought i better save the game quite often in a new game, but then i spendt half and houre more looking for the save button without being able to find it.
So really as it is now i can't play it.

Edit: one of the developers told me how to save, all i had to do was tp press F5, but there is something missing in a game where the developers need to tell you something like that.
So i did start a new game and played for a couple of houres or so, only interrupted by crashes every 10 minutes. but the day after when i wanted to play on the game said the savegame was missing some files.

The game is reasonably entertaining but there are a lot of stuf in the game that could be reworked a bit more.
-The tutorial is horible, it's really hard to follow what it wants
-The user interface is a mess, everything you click on opens a new window on top of other windows and then and you othen need to go through a lot of windows to find what you want
-The game can sometimes be hard to understand as it does a lot of illogical things
-The game crashes a lot
-The game is full of bugs

But still if the savegame thing is fixed i think this is a game i would want to spend some time on
Also, it's a shame the game don't support Linux or Mac

At the time of writing this review Arms Dealer is still in early access. Despite this I have yet to experience any significant crashes or glitches. Content is definitely lacking at this point but I understand their desire to aim for major content releases, especially as the game launches out of early access soon. That said it is a unique and enjoyable simulation experience and for gun enthusiasts it probablly has more firearms than any other title. The possibility of free DLC and mods make this game a hidden gem.

What makes Arms Dealer and its development house truly special is the level of honesty and communication that Case In Point's chief developer keeps with the community. Other staff reflect this quality and it has been a great experience for me in restoring my faith in early-access and small development houses, especially after placing so much excitement into "The Stomping Lands."

In short while I would recommend the game I cannot recommend more highly the house and staff behind it. They make a good game and they treat their customer with honesty, respect, and a sorely endangered sense of integrity.

I Found the game to be a tad bit confusing at first, but eventually I got right into it and ended up playing for 5 hours straight! Selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Javelin missile launchers to fuel a civil war in the middle east is oddly very satisfying! :D I would definitely reccomend picking it up for $14.86!

Pros:
- Lots & lots of cool weapons
- Awesome soundtrack
- Feel like Nicholas Cage
- Game is still early access so lots of room for improvement
- Easy to use layout
- Great development team!

Cons:
- Early access so still a few bugs to be worked out
- Slightly confusing at first, not much of a tutorial

Even in its unfinished early access state, I would rate this game 8/10
This game has some serious potential once fully completed!

Tons of text to read. Time of date moves at least X8-10 faster then a real day. Great soundtrack, and most importantly, it's never about shooting guns. The game loads up ultra fast since it uses gamestudio, and it may be even faster then one of those flash games or phone apps. This game definately has that kind of feel similar to a phone/flash game, but the major difference is that this is a stand alone game, hence you are not bombarded with microtransactions and dlc content that you won't want to even pay full price on. There is a lot of different types of gun to trade, and sometimes keeping track of what you have and what you can sell to specific countries may take a while to get used to. but overall it is a very enjoyable experience, and may offer a relatively differemt experience for people who play a lot of fps games, but want to get into the selling side of the business, rather then the side that buys them and uses them.

If you have ever played Guns Girls Lawyers Dollars, this game is in a similar vein.

Otherwise; it's a game about selling arms. Simple but true, thats the entire concept. The execution is very good however, you can load goods into chartered flights or use your own personal vehicles which you can buy at various points. You can see conflicts and sell weapons to both sides for profit.

A good game, even in its early access state. The developers are unmatched in their communication and presence on the forum, on that alone this is a good game to invest in.

As the Ferengi say, 'war is good for profit'.

Now to start I would like to point out Arms dealer is a game that you will need to sink in a bit of time before you can really understand and have fun with the game. With this said I had alot of time on my hands, so i decided to buy the game and check it out.
Pros:
Great layout
nice music
cool guns
Badass vibe
relaxing
Cons:
A bit of a pain in the bum to understand
Needs a bit more clarification in the tutorials.

With that said given the price i would give this game a solid 7.5/10

I Enjoy the strategy built into this game, like moving arms based on wartime inflations and the different routes to take. one thing i do hope in the future is that the conflits of war be a little more realistic.. Austrailia at war with Canada is a bit farfetch'd. This game has potential.

Ugh... I was so excited for this game, but it's from a new indie dev that isn't ready for primetime. As other reviews have noted, the UI is painfully bad and sometimes counter-intuitive. It's so early in development that all you can do is shuffle arms to make money. Doing so is fairly dull feat, as all of the potentially interesting content: alignments, rivals, law-enforcement, plot, quests, aren't implemented yet.

This game could theoretically get better, but right now I can't recommend it.

**RELEASE DAY UPDATE**

Bottom line up front: Still underwhelming.

The UI has gotten better but is still not good. The popup dialogs are still obtrusively large and don't close/minimize in a common sense kind of way. The tutorial popup is particularly bad as it's opaque, unmovable and stays behind most the other popup dialogues. The other UI element, the world map has gotten slightly better but is still lacking. You still can't scroll the map at all (arrows, WASD, or mouse drag) and can only do point zooms with a scrollwheel. Some of the countries are so small that you'll be pixel hunting to click on "The Random Islands" (ingame country name for the Maldives, no clue why).

Some new mechanics were introduced. Building and upgrading vehicles is actually interesting. Bidding on blind crates is a decent mini-game. So are the "Black Umbrella" terrorist acts to trigger wars.

Still the overall game is painfully dull. It takes a certain lack of vision to make arming Iran with Israeli arms for an invasion of Central America boring.