|
|
Fix-It-Up: World Tour HD
|
|
|
|
|
|
Graphics & Sound:
Fix-It-Up World Tour HD has a top-down perspective, for the most part, but despite the smallish characters, you can still easily tell what is going on and the developers were really able to convey a lot on screen at once. Your business is buying/ selling/ fixing up cars so it's important to be able to see what is going on at all times. Customers will drive up in front of your dealership and say "hello" in various voices, depending on the characters and when you click on the car to see what its status is and how much they want to sell it for, you can see a larger close-up of the potential customer. Customers walking up and down the street will sometimes have a particular type of car in mind or even a specific aftermarket tweak and you can tell this by the tiny thought bubble above them. Someone wanting something special can mean a huge difference in what they are willing to pay over the average customer, so it pays to be observant and put that type of car out for sale from your inventory when you see a hungry buyer approaching.
As you travel around the world as Kate, opening up new branches of your fix-it auto business, each country's location will have decorative tidbits and sound effects to convey where you are. For instance, when you are in Japan, you'll see Asian writing all around and a large Asian graphic on the parking lot and a lot of times, the background noises and sound effects will sound like that country's dialect. However, when you are in London, some of the background chatter you will hear doesn't sound the least bit British and in fact, sounds more like an angry African American woman from the South who is mad at someone who didn't hold up there end of the bargain. It's pretty laughable, I must say. That wasn't a detractor though, I just found it humorous. A lot of times, the customers walking the streets will be dressed in garb appropriate to their country, so those were nice little touches. Also, the background music was always pleasant and gave off an appropriate vibe for whatever country you were in at the time.
|
|
|
Gameplay:
Kate has decided to take on the world with her auto business and it's up to you to help her out, together with her potential boyfriends, rivals Martin and Steve in Fix-It-Up World Tour HD. Kate will travel all around the world opening new locations of her business, from places in the USA, to Mexico, Canada, Brazil, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Congo, Spain, England, Russia, Japan and finally Hong Kong. There's a loose storyline holding Fix-It-Up World Tour HD together which drives some of the various goals you'll have in each level, but you don't need to pay too much attention to it to succeed, as it is more of a way to drive the game forward than anything else.
You'll begin with a modest car dealership/ repair shop and will eventually expand to not only various locations in the world, but your shop will become capable of much more than simple repair. You'll also have a painting area, a waxing area, an area for doing tuning, one for mods, and finally, one for breaking cars down into parts. Any clean and working car you have on your lot will continually generate rental income for you, so it pays (literally!) to keep a few high end cars hanging around. However, if a car is sitting in the lot and not in the "for sale" area, and you do not take specific measures, it can break down over time and require repair, costing you spare parts, which in turn, cost you money. You can take a working car back into the repair and get "insurance" on it, which appears as a green shield-like badge over the car and the car won't break down, but if you do another change to it, such as tune it or mod it, you'll have to drop it back into repair and get the insured again.
Your goals can be anything from reaching a certain monetary goal, to earning a specific amount in rent, to modding or tuning or even buying a set number of specific cars. What I found annoying was the fact that some goals asked you to buy a certain number of a particular type of car, and if you don't watch the specific wording, it can mean that you must retain those cars in your lot instead of simply purchasing them (and then selling them later).
|
|
|
Difficulty:
There is no selectable difficulty in Fix-It-Up World Tour HD and overall, the game is not particularly difficult. It just takes persistence and often, the goals resemble puzzles to be figured out. For instance, if you need to reach a set amount of rent money, that doesn't mean that you must make that much money, because that would be easy, even if you only had a few cars gathering rent in your fleet. Every few minutes, a counter resets and you earn that set rental dollar amount over again, so the waiting game can actually earn you a pile of cash. When the game wants you to meet a certain amount in rent, what it really expects is that at any given time, the cars in your fleet must be earning that much rent. When you are talking about multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's not that easy. You'll have to determine which car type in that level is the most expensive that can be bought or sold, and you will have to buy enough of those to fill all available parking lot slots, then tune, mod, paint, wax and insure each one to guarantee maximum rental profits. Like I said, it can be a somewhat intricate puzzle. Aside from that, just working your way through the levels and watching to make sure you have enough spare parts and cash flowing in will guarantee success.
|
|
|
Game Mechanics:
Fix-It-Up World Tour HD has pretty simple controls. You will click on the cars of the customers who drive up to see what they want to sell their cars for, then click the green check if that price works for you or click the red "x" to send them on their way. Once a car is purchased, you can glance at the HUD to determine its state. If it needs repair, you will drag it to the repair station to get patched up and insured. From there, depending on what goals you have, you can either paint, tune, mod, wax or demolish it. You can then sell the car in one of your two available spaces and hopefully earn top dollar for it (unless you demolished it for spare parts). In some levels, you can buy and sell motorbikes and in some of the later levels, you will even be tuning concept cars as part of the storyline.
For each level you undertake, there is a Gold or Silver time goal that you can try to best. Gold is a relatively short (but doable) time goal, while Silver is more lenient. After that, you just have unlimited play until you complete your goal. Additionally, you can go back and play any of the levels completed on Free Play, if you don't want to fool with the storyline.
In addition to watching your inventory of spare parts and buying them as needed, you will often be required to hire additional employees for the different work areas, upgrade those areas, and initially, you'll have to build the areas, all of which takes money and employee resources. Sometimes, you'll be requested to hire experts, which cost more and take longer to "hire." Hiring someone is as simple as clicking a button, just like buying spare parts, but then a timer starts and you must wait the few minutes for that task to finish before you can proceed. If you have 500 spare parts in your inventory and you buy more, then your inventory is locked until those new parts are added to it. It just means you sit and wait for a bit.
In between levels, you can spend the coins you earn during levels on fixing up your mansion with fences, garages, etc. all of which appear on your mansion as you make modifications. Honestly, this felt more tacked on than anything else, though.
Overall, I had fun with Fix-It-Up World Tour HD. It's surely not my favorite time management/ simulation game, but it was fun and a little bit different than the standard fare. While I found the storyline a bit outlandish, you play these types of games for the gameplay and not the story.
|
|
|
-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins |
|
Related Links:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
