Masterful PC Building....and, Occasionally Cleaning up Spilled Drinks

 I've spent most of my gaming time this past week checking out the newest expansion for one of my favorite simulation games, PC Building Simulator.  The E-Sports Expansion offers the chance for a new, more structured type of gameplay that still hinges on repairing, improving, and building PC's.  My favorite parts of the new expansion are the more character driven, personal/story-based elements that have been added in.

Your cell phone allows players to contact you with their requests.

If you're a fan of the base game you are probably familiar with career mode--you run a PC repair shop, customers e-mail you daily about jobs and then your task is to complete them accurately and in a timely manner.  In the E-Sports expansion you play the role of tech support for a budding e-sports team--your job is to keep the PC's of the team in tip-top/working shape to help the team win matches in different leagues.  Much of the core gameplay is similar--you still get jobs via e-mail, but the addition of a cell phone means that individual players can now (somewhat annoyingly) text you to make special requests....and a big part of the expansion is trying to manage ALL the requests because unlike in normal career mode where you're just trying to fulfill the job request from one customer, now you have to balance the demands of the team managers, the sponsors, and the individual players.  Balancing all these demands is very important because your work gets rated by all of those entities in a system of "likes," and the more likes you get the more opportunities will arise to take a new position with bigger, better teams.

The beginning office space is pretty plain.

The beginning of the expansion sees you taking a job with a one player team competing in the fictional game "Heart of Stone" (described as a competitive card game...hmmm, I wonder what they're referring to--winky face emoji).  You start off in a bare-bones, basic office space that looks like it's tucked away in some sort of storage area.  The good news is that even in your boring starting space you have access to fully upgraded tools and the entire catalog of components in the base game...that doesn't mean you can go bonkers and build amazing, wonder PC's, because each week you have a different budget and if you go over budget you will lose likes.  Teams compete in matches each Saturday, so throughout the week they will e-mail and text you requests.  At the beginning of the week the corporate sponsors also will establish what they would like to see--it could be something like all members on the team using a certain branded type of CPU or more mundane things like changing RGB lighting to reflect brand colors.  Generally the players on the team will want their PC's back relatively quickly so that they can practice.  Sometimes misfortune happens and PC's get damaged, sometimes players decide their PC needs some sort of upgrade or certain type of component or they get a wild hair and decide at the last minute that they want purple cables--the PC's inevitably find their way back and you fulfill the various demands before the end of the week.  Besides dealing with the individual PC's of the players on the team, there is also the opportunity to complete side jobs that appear via e-mail--sometimes the players have other PC's they want you to repair, or PC's of their friends, or the CEO of the team needs you to take a look at their personal PC....sheesh, they're really taking advantage of having a tech support person!  These jobs are generally a boon because you can earn extra money which can help you stay within the weekly budget (which generally isn't too difficult).

Players will send you side jobs to complete for extra cash.

The next new part of the gameplay takes place on competition day--you start backstage at the venue where the players compete.  Players will text you with last minute requests prior to the competition starting and you only have a limited amount of time to get the task done because there is a timer.  Sometimes a part gets broken and you have to quickly replace it; sometimes they decide you should overclock their CPU/GPU; sometimes they just want those damn purple cables...but you have to get it done quickly.  Once you've done whatever fixing/improving you've been assigned, the next task is to setup the PC's on stage which is also done on a timer.  If everything is in working order, the competition begins and you wait backstage--the clock ticks down and either the match ends, or something happens that requires you to complete another timed task--"oh noes, my hard drive crashed!"--*you scamper backstage to order another one and quickly replace it, re-install the needed game and then return to your place backstage.*  Once the match has ended you get a series of texts--each player gives you likes for how well you met their demands through the week (did you forget the purple cables?), the team gives you likes for fulfilling the manager requests, and the sponsors give you likes.  Your likes accumulate on your "LikedIn" app and at the end of the league (which varies throughout the game--the first league is only one week long, but the leagues for other games are longer--2-3 weeks) you can choose which team you want to work for based the number of "likes" you have earned.  You can choose to stick with the same team, but as the game progresses you change leagues to different games.  Each progressive league gets more complex as the number of players on the team increases from one at the beginning to four in the final league.

Moving up the career ladder means a super cool office.

As your record of masterful PC building becomes more recognized your office space gets much swankier.  It also means that the jobs and demands get more complicated--now you have to build the team PC's from scratch, they have to benchmark at high scores, and they need custom water cooling!  It can be a lot to figure out, but the PC's you build are amazing and much cooler than probably anything you will do in normal career mode.

Pros:

+Start the game with the entire catalog of components and upgrades unlocked.

+ New cell phone feature makes balancing demands more complicated.

+ Each team is made up of individual players with their own quirks and personalities and has its own story...and drama!  It is enjoyable to have some personality injected into the game--there is some of that in a few jobs in career mode, but it's a core part of the E-Sports Expansion.  Team drama also plays out through the jobs you do--players get jealous or resentful and want you to make their PC better than the rest of the team or they want a more unified approach.  It's fun to have these more story-based elements in the game.

+ The gameplay gets more complicated as you progress.  You start off with just a one player team and eventually work your way to managing a team of four.  The jobs get more complicated as you progress.

Each office has a special shelf for your collectibles.

+ Collectibles.  At the end of each league your team will send you memorabilia that appears on a special shelf in your office.  It's a fun little feature.

+ Multiple teams and career paths.  After you've finished the first league you can choose to stick with the same team (but in a different league) or to move to a different team.  So far I've played completely through two different teams and am working on a third team.  There's replayability value in the fact that you can restart your e-sports career and continue earning the collectibles for each team--gotta catch em' all!

+Build some wicked awesome PC's!  The jobs in career mode can be fairly bland, but by the time you've earned your way into the final league of the E-Sports Expansion you have a big budget and the ability to create truly powerful (and super expensive) PC's with tons of personal details.  Cheetah-fast CPU's!  Custom watercooled CPU's and GPU's!  Make it raaaaiiiin!

+ Timer adds pressure on competition days and provides some gameplay variety.

Cons:

- Bugs.  There are some documented issues with some of the content.  The one bug I ran into happened when I had a side job that required me to replace an M.2 drive with a specific brand/type of M,2.  The problem was that the requested M.2 drive wouldn't fit into the motherboard in the PC...and you couldn't replace the mobo.  So, I had to fail the job, which was a bit frustrating, but wasn't gamebreaking.  Others have reported issues with timers not appearing on competition days preventing them from progressing.  Some fixes need to occur and most likely will be in the coming weeks (since the game was only released like a week ago).  It's something to be aware of at this point.  It may also be a bug that on some missions it says to repair something and you can't simply replace the same part and the job will only complete if you use an upgraded part (there's one job where I struggled to figure out why it wouldn't complete and finally arrived at that solution after quite a bit of time).

- There is definitely replayability value in the various teams and career paths, but in order to fully access all the teams you have to go back and replay some of the same content over multiple times--there is a certain team that requires a higher number of likes and those can only be acquired by playing through the early leagues.  It gets a bit tedious.

Recommendation:

The E-Sports Expansion provides an improved PC building experience with more personality than the base game.  There are multiple career paths and teams to choose from and there are better opportunities to build works of PC art.  Despite the early bugs, I would heartily recommend the expansion to fans of the base game (you should really play the base game first though because the expansion expects you to use the full range of skills you learn in regular career mode).