Like those dreadful early tractor sims, the most fun is to be found in subverting its po-faced requests.

Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of space-bound equipment loosely placed on a platform then driven over an assault course. And then have to drive it up and down a ramp. This culminates in a challenge so silly as to be surely a joke - you must drive the shuttle precariously balanced on the back of a vast platform, such that accelerating to 5 kph too quickly causes the spaceship to topple over and explode. The game's last few sections involve getting a space shuttle ready for launch, which sounds far more exciting than it is, instead involving even less involved tasks than you've encountered previously. Which makes no sense, considering the engine seems to be able to accurately swing the hook around. Using a crane to move four containers from one place to another is immensely dull, and the only possibly interesting bit - getting the crane hook into place - is done for you. Make sure you don't spill any out! Except goodness knows what you'd have to do for that to happen, considering the way I wildly off-roaded to get back. After digging up a couple of tons of silicon rock, you're then tasked with putting it in a massive tipper truck (we're talking ladders to get on board scale) and driving it over to the plant. But then when operating the enormous digger-wheel-doodah (it really made an impression, you can tell), it's a colossal mess of a broken engine, as you watch the metal structure impossibly slide into the rockface, then be told you broke it when seemingly far more appropriately placed. It's still kind of fun to pootle about in the spectacularly huge bucket-wheel excavator, driving what looks like an on-land oil rig to mine rocks out of a nearby cliff-side.

It's a shame, because the novelty of controlling such enormous apparatus could have been quite the thing. Apparently that's a big part of large-scale industrial work - plugging in batteries. The result is a very silly set of tasks set in slow-motion, with no real sense of operating the heavy vehicular machinery, but quite a lot of climbing ladders and plugging in batteries. And perhaps worst of all, despite implementing a physics engine, you don't actually ever hook anything, or pick anything up - it's done automatically by putting one thing in the proximity of another, and a little countdown clock ticking off. Operating a crane takes about ten minutes to manoeuvre it into place, but setting a machine's fuses into the correct position is a puzzle minigame.

This is a game in which you're required to repeat the exact same dull, achingly slow task four times in a row, but you can climb ladders at 5 metres per second. But the game opts for this utterly berserk approach to embracing realism, with its focus entirely placed on the banality of such industrial work, and not in the simulation thereof. Provide a series of enormous vehicles to drive about in a story scenario tangentially linked to launching a shuttle. I didn't want to know this.) Turns out it's even more dreary than he can cope with. (I now know that what I thought were just 'diggers' are in fact 'back hoes'. Perhaps this could be something I play while he watches, instead of having to sit in front of more sodding Blippi YouTube videos. But Giant Machines 2017 grabbed my attention simply because my almost-two-year-old is presently obsessed with all things machinery. I think I came in too early, taking a look at the earlier wave of Farming Simulator and the like when things were very, very poor. I will admit that I have not hitched a ride on the Enthusiasm Simulator 2018, whether genuine, ironic or post-ironic, for your bus driving, truck trundling, bus stopping simulation games. Here's wot I think of Giant Machines 2017 :

Do your vehicles require ladders to get on board? Do they have enough surface area to host a cocktail party? No? Pshah I say. Stand aside, other construction simulators.

Giant machines 2017 cheat