SteamWorld Build

The new SteamWorld entry is a city builder and a great one at that. The first layer is a SimCity-style game, with further additions of improved Impressions Games mechanics. Your citizens have cravings and you need to fulfil them to upgrade the houses. But instead of stupid AI walkers the goods affect the houses in walking distances through roads, and better designed and higher quality roads spread the goods farther.

The gameplay in the underground layers is inspired by Dungeon Keeper, even your miners do imp noises. It has light tower / cop defence, and light automation with conveyors.

With so many cravings of your citizens there is a ton of resources and a rather complex economy. But it is rather easy to manage even on the hardest difficulty. With lower rates and taxes i still managed to finish my second city on hardest faster than my first on medium. At least on medium, it’s actually possible to scale up until all your resources are in proficit.

The train (trading) station sells about three random artefacts per cycle which you can slot into buildings and rooms. They cost two currencies — taxes and rubies. You can mine some rubies in the mines, but once they run out you can only wait until the station randomly offers some rubies for taxes.

Starting with the second layer of the mine you have to defend from spawning enemies. Your militia is not that strong even with buffs, medics and artefacts, neither are your turrets. On the medium difficulty they kinda can keep the bugs at bay on the second floor, but get wiped out every time on the third floor even if you have a lot of very expensive end-game turrets. On the hardest even the bugs eat all your cops, even when you cover as much of the floor as you can with the cop room/s. You have to fix things and replace broken rooms and conveyors after each attack. Playing on hardest and without turrets at the same time was a challenged idea.

When you start the game you can pick one out of five maps. Winning one gives you a wonder building with some interesting bonuses. So it would be smarter to start the hard mode with either all five, or at least with free roads and conveyors / efficient rooms. Though, i still managed to beat it on the hardest just with the faster train, while also not using turrets or even thumpers.

The game has a real proper campaign with a proper tutorial, which most of the city builders are missing. One run takes about 6-8 hours of play. Instead of cutscenes the game has lazy-posterior puppydoodoo motion comics. And by default the campaign runs in english. You have to know that there’s the proper bot VO and to manually enable it.

There’s no fast game speed. Only normal and normal with double arrow which is probably a sliver faster. It’s annoying when during the end-game you just do nothing and wait for the rocket fuel to be produced. Both on medium and the hardest difficulty i was idling.

And then there are the wonky achievements. The sane ones already can refuse to track or even reset progress. And then the game asks of you to gather insane amounts of wood and to build insane amounts of roads. After two runs of the campaign i was at, like, 20% progression in one and 10% in the other. Oh wow such fun and interesting and engaging achievements. I launched my finished first city with maximum woodcutters and let the game run in idle. It took almost 24 hours to get the wood achievement. Then i was just creating new fossil cities and paving them for more than an hour until i unlocked the last achievement.

Most SteamWorld games end up being the best games of the year on technicalities. But outside of the achievements (which don’t matter) and the terrible uncut-scenes, this is one of the (two) best games of this “year” on its own merits. It is one of the rare enjoyable city-builders and it has some “original” mechanics.