Dirty Business

I dove into Dirty Business expecting a niche management sim and came away pleasantly surprised — and mildly annoyed in equal parts. The premise is delightfully blunt: run illegal production lines underneath a city, hire a ragtag crew, and ship your contraband via elevators, front companies, or a secret airstrip. If you enjoyed games like Schedule 1/Schedule II or simple base-builders such as Cash Cleaner Sim, you’ll find familiar comfort here, but with its own stubborn identity. It’s a game that’s clearly Early Access: there’s polish missing, but the loop is already fun enough to keep me coming back, usually with a friend in co-op and way too much coffee.

Manufacturing in the Shadows

The core run of the game is gloriously hands-on: you start in a cramped concrete room and slowly turn it into an industrial spiderweb. Most of my sessions involved planting crops, running chemical setups, or assembling weapons and counterfeit bills, then juggling orders and deciding whether to fill them for reputation or sell raw product for quick cash. The pace is deliberately grindy — you expand, unlock machines, place tables and stations, and micro-manage workers until the day you can automate the majority of the flow. Interacting with boxes, picking items up, and placing them onto shelves or into the elevator is satisfying when it works, but takes time to master thanks to some awkward controls. There’s a tactile joy to reorganizing your base and optimizing conveyors and workstations, especially when a shipment finally clears the elevator and you watch profits roll in.

When Logistics Become Criminal Art

What sets Dirty Business apart is how it treats distribution as gameplay rather than a mere income number. Small and medium orders go up the elevator, front-company vans handle larger surface runs, and then there’s the secret cartel airstrip for massive shipments — I loved the cinematic thrill of watching a crate disappear into the night sky. Hiring dealers to move product across districts and deciding who to trust adds an extra layer of strategy: do you invest in more production or in better distribution routes? The delivery system is one of the game’s best hooks, and when it meshes with your production rhythm, it creates a satisfying conveyor-belt of decisions. That said, many players — and I — noticed the game leans heavy on micromanagement early on, especially before staff systems fully kick in.

A Basement with Character (and Bugs)

Visually Dirty Business is gritty rather than pretty: practical textures, readable UI, and clear machine icons get the job done, though the art aims for functional noir rather than flashy polish. Audio does its job too — ambient hums, clanks, and muffled city noise make the basement feel alive. Performance on Windows has been mostly stable for me, but some reviewers report frame hiccups early on; as an Early Access title that’s to be expected. Accessibility is basic: controls are serviceable but clunky in places (box handling, precise placement), and there are recurring complaints about items not aligning to walls and odd placement slants. The devs are active and responsive, which makes those rough edges more forgiveable since fixes and QoL tweaks are regularly discussed.

Dirty Business is a promising, if imperfect, underground tycoon — a grindy, sometimes buggy Early Access game with a genuinely fun production-distribution core and solid co-op appeal. I’d recommend it to players who enjoy optimization puzzles, base-building and long-term progression, and who don’t mind doing some of the devs’ QA for them. If you’re looking for a polished, pick-up-and-play experience without micromanagement, wait for a few QoL patches. For everyone else: grab a friend, embrace the chaos, and enjoy the sticky satisfaction of a cartel airstrip clearing its first big shipment.