Offworld Trading Company on paper sounds like a great game: it has resource mining, technology development, buildings to build and cut-throat competition. However, all these parts do not add up to addictive game.
Since I haven't played good trading sim in long time I decided to buy OTC after seeing great review from gamespot. As the title suggests, you are in charge of offworld company whose goal is to take over all of your competitors. To accomplish that you can mine resources such as uranium, aluminum, iron, carbon or water and transform them into products like steel, glass, chemicals, electronics or food. If you have enough resources you can build research center that will develop technologies that will aid your business. You can also hire shady services from black market to harass your competition- for example, get pirates to rob supply routes or even destroy building/ mine with nuclear device. The game has pretty tutorials and after completing all of them I felt ready to play skirmish game.
Pretty soon, however, I realized that in its core game is too simple- you just wait long enough to sell enough resources to buy enough shares and take over the competition. Sure, I used black market to mess with my competitors (mostly because they were messing with me) and I did research technologies, but these seemed like distractions so you don't get bored while you wait for having enough dough to eliminate next player. There is a phase where you build up and you do have to exercise caution to not to be short on critical resources and /or cash needed to expand. Quickly enough though, you learn that there are few key steps that you have to repeat every time to have successful game. Including tutorials, I spend three hours playing the game and I don't see it having much more longevity beyond that. Maybe the trick is to play with friends rather than single player skirmishes as I did.