The much anticipated sim Automation is nearly here. Well the demo is here for us pre orderers and for you non committal types you’ll get a taste later in the month. I spent a lot of the day with the game today trying out the sandbox mode and various scenarios for the engine builder. The demo only gives us the engine builder part of the game which is looking very promising.
Let’s discuss the engine building portion. I’m a car nerd, well I’m a nerd in general and what I see here is sim city for car nerds. I love sim city. I’d seen the videos for automation and what they were doing with the engine builder but I guess seeing is believing and after spending a good chunk of my Easter Sunday with the game I’m a firm believer. Let’s take sandbox mode for example. You’ll start with a bare engine stand on the engine dyno. From there you will start with the bottom end of the engine selecting the block, size, and materials it’s made of. Then the crank, pistons, rods, bore, stroke, and flywheel. All of these are tweakable in many ways really giving you the feel for building a bottom end. Next you’ll move on to the top end which has things like head type (OHC, DOHC, OHV, etc) valve count, materials, compression, cam, vvt, cam profiles, etc. Again the game gives us a huge amount of choices here. After we get the head settle we will move on to the fuel system adjusting everything from carbs or efi, to throttle bodies, manifolds, ignition, fuel mixtures and so on. In the future we will get things like turbo and supercharging. Lastly you get to tune your exhaust with several types of manifolds and headers as well as tweaking diameters of piping and types of mufflers.
All of this leads up to testing the engine on the dyno. You will get a very nice read out of hp/torque curves as well as a whole host of information such as expected engine life, roughness, loudness, efficiency, etc. The categories are many and you can see how they lead in to the scenario portion of the game.
The bottom line here is the demo makes Automation look extremely promising. Currently only inline 4 engines are available but we are told others such as V6s and V8 are in the pipe line. IMO those alone will make Automation worth the $35 entrance fee. Someday down the road when the full game is released I will try and do a proper unbiased review, but until then check it out. If you don’t want to plop down your money in advance wait for the public demo to go live at the end of the month.
