The streets of Baldtown City are nearly empty of traffic. It's not that it's a ghost town: up and down the pavements there are crowds of citizens bustling to and from work. They pile into subways, queue up at bus stops, and enter and leave the town by a regularly-running intercity metro service. Their city is woven with affordable, clean, public transport. As a representative of big auto, whose one joy in life is bringing people the freedom of car dependency, Baldtown city will have to change.

Car Park Capital is a management game that looks to be straight out of the 90s, born from the same Bullfrog sensibilities that gave us Theme Park and Theme Hospital. Your one goal is to turn the eco-friendly cities before you into petrol-dependent, car-brained, suburbia-living smogfests.

After all, can you imagine a world without cars?

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Getting the good people of Baldtown City off their feet and into the plush leather of an automobile faces two initial hurdles: supply and demand. This is a city that has done without cars for decades. No one is asking for them, no one is buying them, and, worst of all, no one is looking for a place to park them. Which leads me to the second issue: there's nowhere in the city to leave your vehicle should you own one.

Starting with the second problem first, I bring up the city heatmap which shows me where there is the most need for a car park. Anywhere there is a bus stop or a subway station, there are distinct circles of cold, like little ice floes where there is no need for private transport. I'll have to deal with those later. However, right next to the main office block in the centre of town there is a small park that sits slightly out of reach of the public transport network. I buy up the plot of land and send in the bulldozers.

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Car Park Capital is an interesting mix of management game and city builder. Ostensibly, my remit is just building out the city's parking infrastructure, but rather than do this in partnership with the city, it's all handled privately. You purchase plots of land and then you're free to use them how you wish. I pave over the former park with asphalt, set up an entrance and exit gate, and mark out some parking spaces.

Now there is a space to park (and a way for me to bring in a little revenue), I need to drum up some pro-car mentality among the populace. With the pavement space left at the edges of the bulldozed park, I place some tasteful signage informing the locals that they, in fact, love cars and they should, if you think about it, swap their heels for wheels. I can only build signs on the land I own, but that doesn't mean my message has to be so limited: I build a depot for a van fitted with a bullhorn to go around the neighbourhood blaring the praises of the automobile. Soon cars start to trickle into the parking lot, each time paying me cold hard cash for the privilege of renting my asphalt.

But then I hit a hitch. Despite the parking lot and demand for cars, there simply aren't that many car owners in the city. Most of the population claim they don't need them because of their "abundant public transportation system". We'll see about that. I go to buy up the land underneath one of the nearby subway entrances. It's $40,000. I've barely $15,000 to my name. I'll need a lot more people using my parking lots before I can afford to buy out a station.

On the edge of town, I buy a couple of plots of empty land and drop down a pair of factories. These will spit out a new car every 30 seconds or so. I build a delivery lot nearby and from there a truck ferries new cars into town to be sold to waiting customers. Rather than a car dealership, the shop is a carousel with cars hanging from metal cages. Buyers queue up, pick their car, and then watch as the vehicle rotates down to the curbside. The happy customer then drives off into the street throwing a massive thumbs up out the window. To up the demand for the cars, I place a couple of gold statues nearby that celebrate the joys of car ownership. In moments like this, Car Park Capital looks like it could be a lost Bullfrog game.

With the number of car owners rising, the use of my car parks increases which means I'm earning more cash. I'm still way off the $40,000 I need to buy a subway station, though, and until I do that damn public transport is sapping these citizen's desire for parking.

While there are parts of the city pockmarked with public access, not everywhere is so well served. There's a district that has but one tube station and the rest of the people are making do with a single bus stop. Now, the key thing to know about bus stops, for the car-brained entrepreneur such as myself, is that the land they sit on is much cheaper than a subway. I leave the big game that is a subway station until later, and instead buy the land under the bus stop. I hover the bulldozer button over the unassuming shelter for a second and then I click. It disappears in a puff of debris and the spot goes from a cold grey on the heat map to a lovely warm orange.

I buy up the nearest plot of land, which is filled with tenement buildings, and try to demolish the houses. Apparently, I can't knock them down when there are people still living inside. Happily, I have another button on my toolbar: evict. I turf the residents to the curb, knock down their homes, and build a second multi story.

(Don't worry about the residents, I built some suburban homes way out of town. They can live there. Of course, to get into town, they'll need to buy some cars.)

With parking spaces now in high demand and a new multistory available for the use, the demand for cars shoots up. To meet it, I need to build more factories. I scroll back over to my small factory district, already thinking how much expanding my operation will cost. I needn't have worried. Left to chug away and spew out automobiles, the factories have polluted all the land in the vicinity. Whereas before it had cost me $3000 a pop to buy up each plot of land, newly toxified they are now a much more reasonable $0. I expand the setup to ten factories and watch as truck after truck carrying trailers loaded with cars travel to the carousels and load them up with vehicles for the purchasing.

As more and more people become car owners and my lots fill with their vehicles, I am rewarded with new technologies and new demands. I unlock drive-thrus, which are a nice little earner, but at the same time citizens start getting hungry. If I don't litter the cities with places to buy fries and burgers (and build the farms and cow-mincing facilities to produce their patties) then they will grow dissatisfied, and they won't pay as much to use my parking lots. Later I unlock fuel pumps, but these, too, now need oil derricks and refineries to keep them supplied with petrol. My favourite, though, is when citizens start demanding somewhere to go to the loo. I assumed it was for the passengers, but soon the streets are covered in oil stains from cars that just can't hold it any longer. When I do place the facilities, they look like a giant flush toilet. The cars drive into the bowl and are then flushed out the exit. Again, there is a great deal of the Bullfrog in Car Park Capital.

While some residents are happy with all this automotive freedom I'm delivering, there's growing unrest from the people complaining I'm "Destroying all the parks", "Polluting the ground water", and "Making people homeless". While I would like to explain to them that, in a car, you can visit car parks, and ground water is hardly an issue when your wheels are the only thing that touch the soil, and homelessness… who needs a home when you have the freedom of the open road and the thrill of a giant car toilet? But talking them through all that would take too long. So, instead, when protestors glue themselves to my car factory, gumming up the machines with their intolerable bodies, or start a protest, littering the streets with the anti-car signs and peace symbols, I send in the riot police and dogs.

At last, after all my hard work, I look at my bank balance and I've hit the necessary $40,000. I buy up one of those arrogant tube stations and knock it down. The heatmap turns orange. My car parks get fuller. The dollars roll in. I set my sights on the next piece of the public infrastructure to demolish.

Car Park Capital isn't a complex game. At least, not yet; it may get more involved with updates through early access. At the moment, money isn't truly hard to come by and the challenge of putting down protests and spreading your network of car parks, factories, and oil refineries isn't steep. But it is all enjoyable.

Perhaps the fact that the game is so rigged in your favour is the satire: that when you're in Big Auto, the world jumps to your orders. You can just buy up and demolish a system that serves the public without making the argument that what you're building is better. A game from the protestors' point of view, where the ground can be bought out from under you, your signs can be torn down, and your people beaten up by riot police or savaged by dogs, would be much harder.

Though, a game like that probably wouldn't have an adorable, malevolent desktop assistant that looks like Clippy's wheel-based cousin.