Gas Station Simulator - The most realistic gas station simulator?

[Spotty]

 

 

Gas Station Simulator sees you purchase a run down gas station on Route 66 in Nevada, America. You'll start out pulling planks off the boarded up doorways and clearing trash, but thanks to a loan from your shady Uncle you'll be able to afford some gas for the pumps and some basic shelves inside the station to stock some snacks and drinks. You'll find yourself serving customers at the register, filling up tanks at the pump, keeping the store clean and tidy, and as you progress you'll be fixing up customer cars in the workshop repairing flat tyres and small scratches and dents on door panels. As your station grows you can upgrade to add more space in the store, more pumps, a workshop, and will be able to hire some workers to help out. But first your Uncle needs that money he loaned you back and he's not the sort of guy that forgives a debt!

 

 

 

Gamplay Mechanics

The jobs are all small, very basic mini games. All are pretty quick and simple but combined it can be stressful trying to serve all customers at once, maintain inventory and keep the place clean. You'll constantly have something to do and impatient customers waiting.

 

The Register/Store

Working the register involves scanning items as they appear on the conveyor belt. This is honestly the most tedious and frustrating minigame. You'll move the conveyor belt and try to scan items and place them in the basket fast enough to keep up with the speed of the belt. You can always stop the belt, but it just doesn't feel as satisfying. The belt feeds directly in to the basket so if you're not quick enough items will fall in without the customer paying for them - which for some reason makes the customer very annoyed. Scan it right though and you'll get a small tip (a random amount that seems to be around 10% of their total) and a boost to your popularity.

Tip: Make your employees do it

 

Gas Pumps

By far the easiest minigame, filling up the tank involves waiting for a customer to get out of their car and then you just grab the nozzle and stick it in the tank. The fuel will slowly fill and when the needle hits where the customer wants it you click to stop. Easy. Just keep plenty of gas in your stations tank and selling gas is a good way to make money. Gas sells for $3/gallon and can be bought for on average $2/gallon so can be a nifty little earner.

Tip: Lockpick cars waiting for gas

 

Cleaning

Customers hate a dirty gas station. Which is weird since they make the mess only to complain about it! Customers will constantly be muddying up your nice clean floors with their dirty shoes and you'll spend a lot of time push a broom around the floor to keep things tidy. There's two trash cans inside the station which will fill up as customers place rubbish in them - that is if the customers don't just drop their rubbish on the ground. The floor gets dirty way too quickly so expect to spend a lot of time running through the store quickly pushing a broom around to clean up some dirty spots to get the store back in a more presentable state. There's a cleanliness meter in the top corner constantly reminding you how dirty you are and when it falls too low customers are unhappy.

You'll need to call for a garbage truck to pick up the trash from skip bins periodically.

Tip: With the broom you can do pretty long strokes and clean a few spots at once so with a bit of practice it can be pretty quick to just run through and quickly clean a few spots then go back to other tasks.

Tip: Customers don't seem to care about rubbish on the ground, or at least nowhere near as much as they do about footprints. Don't worry too much about cleaning up every little bit of rubbish quickly.

 

Workshop

At the workshop you'll be performing basic repairs for customer cars, starting at replacing the occasional broken mirror or flat tyre to changing batteries, topping up oil and coolant, and changing spark plugs with a fully upgraded workshop. Hoist the car up to see what needs fixing then grab the parts and get to work. Each part will require interaction to fix, for example fixing a flat tyre requires unbolting the flat, removing the wheel, placing the new wheel on, and tightening the bolts. Think of it as an extremely basic version of car mechanic simulator, but with customers waiting to buy their pringles and fuel up their vehicle you don't have time to be doing full engine teardowns.

Tip: Even if you don't have all of the parts needed to fix the vehicle repair what you can. The customer will be unhappy but you'll still get paid for the work you did do. Click the button near the lift to send them on their way without finishing.

 

 

Inventory management

Perhaps one of the most important gameplay mechanics, you'll constantly be managing your stock of gas for the station, inventory for the store, and automotive parts for the workshop. Parts can be ordered at the computer in the store which will show you price history for the items. Stock up when prices are low, but if you don't have things customers want in stock they'll leave unhappy. Your warehouse space is limited so there's only so much stock that you can store so you have to balance between buying what you need now and making sure you don't get caught out of stock of something you need. A customer needing a flat tyre replaced isn't going to be happy if you decided not to buy tyres because they were a little pricey that day, but there's also no point storing 300 cola cans in the warehouse taking up all your available space.

Tip: Check the prices for inventory and auto parts daily. Prices change each day and there can be some drastic changes in prices from one day to the next. Always keep an eye out for a bargain.

 

Ordering stock from the computer will send a delivery truck toy our warehouse and you'll need to open the door to let the truck in and unload the truck. Though, don't leave the warehouse unattended with the doors open. If you rush back to serve a customer at the pumps you'll soon find some of your warehouse stock stolen. You'll be very impatiently waiting for the driver to get back in to his truck after you unload your goods just so he can drive off and you can close the doors so you can get back to serving customers before they grow impatient and leave.

Tip: You can open the door and start unloading before the truck is in the warehouse. Handy if you have both a automotive parts and snacks truck waiting at the same time.

 

Lockpicking

Vehicles with trunks can be lockpicked open to earn a little extra cash. The mechanics for lockpicking involve using the mouse (or A/D keys) to rotate a pick to find the sweet spot and holding spacebar to rotate the lock - if you try unlocking with the pick in the wrong spot it will get stuck and break if you force it. Jiggle around to find the sweet spot. There's 3 difficulties in lockping; Beginner, Intermediate, and Master, with the Beginner difficulty having the widest and easiest to find sweet spot and Master being very difficult to get the perfect spot needed. If you've played Skyrim or Fallout you will know how to lockpick. Each car you attempt to lockpick will give you 2 lockpicks to use, if you fail your gas station popularity will fall and will get a bad reputation. The risk is worth the reward though with successfully picking a trunk rewarding you with a random amount around $5 for the beginner picks all the way up to around $25 for the master locks. You can also find cosmetic items such as paintings, plants, statues, and lights in trunks which can be used to decorate your gas station store, though unfortunately these decorative items can only be placed inside the store itself. Customers and police are completely oblivious to you breaking in to vehicles so go crazy.

Tip: Lockpick cars waiting at the gas pumps before filling them up for a extra few bucks.

 

Upgrading your Gas Station

The goal is to upgrade your gas station to turn it from a derelict dump to the best gas station on Route 66. As you level up and complete challenges and events, such as serving 100 customers and repairing 30 vehicles, you'll gain access to purchase upgrades for the Gas Station Store, the Workshop, and the Warehouse. Each upgrade for the store and workshop unlocks new items to sell and new parts to use to repair cars. More items for sale means customers buy more, more parts to repair means each vehicle you repair you can earn more money from. Upgrading the warehouse will increase your storage space.

Tip: Upgrades are a double-edged sword. More pumps means more customers means you go through fuel faster. More inventory types unlocked means you need to manage your inventory space more carefully and keep more things in stock. Upgrading the workshop gives you access to more parts but means repairs require more work and take longer. Make sure you're prepared to buy supplies after the cost of upgrading and can handle the extra work.

 

Employees

As you upgrade your gas station you'll be able to purchase caravans on the site which will allow you to hire a worker for each caravan, up to a total of 5 workers. Each worker will work for a few hours then go rest. Don't expect them to tell you they're going on a break either, you'll left to be wondering why there's a dozen people lined up waiting at the checkout when your worker decided they've had enough and walked off. Employees need constant babysitting, though late game when you're serving a bunch of people at the store, the pumps, and repairing vehicles you simply can't do it all yourself.

Tip: Try to stick employees on register as often as possible.

 

Decorating

You can paint walls and place decorative objects around the gas station. The walls when you start out have paint peeling off and are in quite a sad state, adding a fresh lick of paint really changes the feel of the place and makes it feel fresh and new - even if it doesn't affect anything gameplay wise. Painting is pretty simple, a wheel appears and you have to keep it in the green zone by clicking the mouse. Go out of the zone and it splatters paint over you and you have to clean up the mess. There's also decorative upgrades you can buy for the station, as well as a few small decorative items you can place around the place (get them from locking cars!) Unfortunately the decorative items can only be placed inside the gas station and take away valuable space for stock shelves.

Employees have levels for each task they perform and they'll slowly increase their level as they perform those tasks. I have no idea whether having an employee with level 10 at refueling makes any actual difference than an employee at level 3.

Tip: Painted walls and decorations don't do anything for customer satisfaction. Any changes you make are for your benefit.

Rudy

Almost forgot about this worthless mechanic, but there's a small digger you can use to clear piles of sand that build up from occasional sandstorms. Maybe I got lucky but the sand piles never got in the way of anything so I just left them. It's annoying to drive, slow, and needs constant refuelling.

Tip: It seems you can dump sand anywhere on the outskirts of the station, you don't need to keep making trips back to the sand pit to drop off.

 

 

The Bugs

To say the game is janky would be an understatement. It was released a few days ago, and while you don't feel like you've been Cyberpunked you should expect plenty of jank. Personally I find that the bugs are more quirks and add a certain charm to the game and you can tell the developers definitely aren't taking it too seriously. You can flip cars over and launch them in to space with a broom - perhaps not intended behaviour, but fun nonetheless. Also the broom is a good way to clear cars that get stuck - which will happen - so keep the broom handy.

 

A few bugs I experienced:

• Random crashes to desktop. The game autosaves every few minutes but it is frustrating to lose a little bit of progress. Just scanned through a dozen people at the register and the game crashes? Have fun scanning those customers through again!
• Cars will get stuck in odd places, and there's one particular parking space that police vehicles seem incapable of driving in to. A gentle push with the broom will get them in the spot.
• AI pathfinding is terrible. Employees get stuck trying to walk in to the Warehouse door when it's closed, even when they're not trying to go in to the warehouse and trying to get to their caravan behind the warehouse. They just don't seem to realise there's a building in the way.
• Flipped cars or your employees standing in the middle of the road can also cause traffic jams and prevent customers from leaving, which causes a lot of angry honking.
• Very rarely you just don't get paid for stuff.
• There was one time when I entered the workshop to find 2 car doors and 4 wheels floating there. Not sure how it happened, only saw it once. I could pick up the wheels but unfortunately I couldn't use them on other vehicles to repair flat tyres. Damn, thought I had scored myself 4 free tyres. Needed to restart the game to clear it.
• While in the workshop it won't highlight what parts need fixing - this seems to pop up once you fully upgrade the garage and have two spaces in the workshop to work on two vehicles at once. I think the game has trouble tracking which car you're trying to inspect even when there's only one car there. Walking out of the workshop and back in usually fixes it.
• Loading a saved game will cause the trash bins in the station to think they're full - even if they're not. I've even had it say trash full x3 even though there's only 2 bins. Putting rubbish in them then emptying them fixes it.
• After loading a save sometimes any cars that were already loaded in to the map won't let you lockpick them. Not sure if this is a bug or intentional to stop people abusing save states to pick locks, but given how easy it is to lockpick and the punishment for failing isn't too high it really isn't worth loading a saved game if you fail a lockpick. I think the game just doesn't save whether you've already lockpicked the cars or not and you just have to wait for new cars to spawn.
• Events/Challenges sometimes don't track correctly. If it tells you to refuel 10 cars sometimes refuelling cars doesn't count towards the total and you simply can't finish the challenge, which is frustrating as challenges reward a decent amount of popularity.
• Some steam achievements aren't tracking correctly.

 

 

Performance

Kind of a quick afterthought to the review, but performance is not great. I'm running the game at 2560x1440 on High with an i7 6700k and GTX1080ti and it will often dip as low as 30FPS. It's not the sort of game where framerate matters but it does get low enough that even in a non-competitive game it becomes very noticeable. It does seem to be my ageing 4c/8t CPU holding things back a little. Seems more customers and lots of items with collisions really tanks performance. Restarting or reloading sometimes fixes the framerate issues, so I think there's sometimes weird physics collisions going on that aren't unloading.

 

 

Overall Thoughts

The game always keeps you doing something. Whether that's cleaning, scanning at the register, working the pumps, repairing cars, ordering stock, or just decorating the place. As soon as you take a break to check store inventory and go order a few new things or paint a wall you'll quickly have customers lined up waiting to be served. You're always running from one job to another and trying to prioritise which jobs you do. Constantly moving between the different jobs, spending only a minute on each job at any time, keeps the minigames from getting stale (except scanning at the register, fuck that, that's NPC work).

 

You'll constantly feel under pressure trying to manage everything at once, and when you start out your available funds will always be very tight so you'll have to make tough decisions between restocking items, paying employees, or buying fuel. You can spend $500 on 10x tyres you hope to make $900 for when repairing vehicles, but you won't see a penny back until you get customers come in to the workshop needing to replace flat tyres.

The game seems to do a pretty good job of making you want to play more. As you're constantly rushing from one job to another and always trying to plan what to do next you're always thinking "Oh, I'll just play a bit more and serve these customers at the pump... Oh there's a car that needs fixing in the workshop... Oh no I'm out of tyres I better go order some parts..." and before you know it it's 3 hours later and you're still playing.

 

Expect about 10-15 hours of gameplay to fully upgrade your garage and unlock everything. After you unlock everything there really isn't all that much to accomplish and you do then start to feel like you're going through the motions.

 

The game seems a little... Basic. There's no way to set prices in the store and it could be a lot more involved and require more micromanaging if you could set the prices you sell for at the risk of irritating customers if the prices are too high, though this isn't that kind of simulator.

 

I think the inventory space could use a bit of balancing. Buying drinks come in lots of x30 and will take up 30 space in the warehouse, but buying a tyre will take up only 1 space. You definitely won't have trouble finding space for buying as much autoparts as you can afford but buying even just a few snacks and drinks will find you unable to purchase due to insufficient warehouse space.

 

For $20 I feel like I got my monies worth out of it. I don't think there's that much re-playability to it, and the sort of minigame based gameplay and (very basic) micromanagement definitely won't be for everyone. It's definitely a game that just keeps you feeling busy with small tasks rather than an actual simulator. It does have a certain charm to it though. I do wish that it had co-op gameplay so a few friends and I could get together to work on upgrading the station, or rather I can upgrade the station and they can work the register like the slaves they are.

If you like the power wash or house painting simulator style games and can put up with a few quirks here and there then you'll likely enjoy Gas Station Simulator.

 

 

 

 

Screenshots (Click to enlarge images)

 

To the moon

 

Vehicle repairs

 

 

Stuck between a rock and a dumb NPC

 

"Customer says car won't start"

 

Shut up and take my money! (I bought 120 of that price. It pays to check stock prices)

 

My gas station

[Spotty]

Also forgot, there's a broken car wash behind the gas station. You can see the broken roof for the car wash in my last screenshot above. I got through most of the game expecting to unlock it at some point but it never happened. Seems that it's an intended feature that isn't included yet. A developer responded to a steam discussion saying it's not added yet but will be coming once they fix some of the other bugs.

 

Quote

Car wash is not released yet. We will add it in a one of the later patches. After we sort most of the relevant issues that players are reporting to us..

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1149620/discussions/0/4330763833467548149/

[Skiiwee29]

Didn't know the Fortnite Battle Bus was included  

[FruitOfTheLum]

Funnily enough I saw this on Steam earlier, and I wondered to myself if it was any good or just another 'jokey' simulation game.

 

It doesn't sound like my cup of tea from your review, but it sounds like it has some substance to it. This really sounds like it'd be better as a VR game, though!

[da na]

19 minutes ago, Spotty said:

That's straight out of r/techsupportgore

[Spotty]

6 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

Didn't know the Fortnite Battle Bus was included  

There's a random event (happens fairly frequently) where a bus pulls up and about 15 people wearing costumes dancing get off and they pretty much buy you out of all your stock in the store. They make a mess everywhere too. I hear the music start playing and I set my least liked employee to work the registers (usually whichever dumbass blocked traffic or just randomly walked off a task and caused me to lose customers most recently).

 

4 minutes ago, FruitOfTheLum said:

Funnily enough I saw this on Steam earlier, and I wondered to myself if it was any good or just another 'jokey' simulation game.

 

It doesn't sound like my cup of tea from your review, but it sounds like it has some substance to it. This really sounds like it'd be better as a VR game, though!

VR could work well in this game I think, especially with the little mini game type tasks. Things like repairing vehicles by grabbing the parts and placing them in, picking up the fuel nozzle and putting it in the tank and pressing a button to fill, and picking up and scanning items all would work quite well in VR. Unfortunately I don't think the game supports VR. It's been very popular though so maybe they'll add VR support in the future if enough people ask for it.

Edited September 23, 2021 by Spotty