But once you start repairing the few buildings in the area, suddenly the game opens up in an incredibly beautiful way.įirst, you get access to the train station, a place where you can start deliveries and set up trade routes to other towns, selling your surplus items off to balance your economy. While there’s not a lot of activity to watch, placing the buildings, watching them bounce, and watching as the city grows with each new interaction is satisfying enough. It’s a pleasing enough interface, with buildings and structures bouncing lightly as you put them down, and all the interactions between buildings clearly signposted the way more city builders should.
The initial city-building is relatively simple: Build residences for workers, reach population milestones, unlock buildings, and use those buildings to make your people happier and advance further along supply chains. Then the game pulls out its twist, and suddenly everything gets a little more complicated. In SteamWorld Build, you must escape a dying planet by building a mining town to dig up vital long-lost technology. This starts slowly, as you build up your workforce and supply chains, but soon has you fulfilling needs, building networks of roads, and even trading with other towns along the railroad once you fix up the station. Guided by a mysterious computer core and myths of a rocket buried somewhere underground, you and your settlers start off at a dilapidated train station and set about building yourselves a town. These cogs all fit together to create a satisfying game loop where you are always making progress and are always engaged. Steamworld Build tasks you with, well, building a city. SteamWorld Build's above and below-ground elements have an interdependent relationship where everything you discover, mine or build feeds into what you can do when you switch from above to below, and vice versa. If the final version is anything like the demo, Steamworld Build will be a welcome edition to the narrative city-builder genre.
It’s a top-tier city-building experience, with easy to understand supply chains and a learning curve that makes it all seem easy rather than frustrating, the graphics and setting are (as always) fantastic, and it’s got an intriguing built-in narrative that never feels bolted-on, making it feel of a piece with games like IXION and Against the Storm in terms of gameplay and story integration. From the demo, it feels like Steamworld Build, the upcoming city-builder addition to the Steamworld universe, carries on that tradition beautifully.
Steamworld build series#
The Steamworld series is one that’s been around for a while now, mixing a focus on traditional video game concepts (miner, platformer, tactical strategy game) with a wildly imaginative setting, some outside-the-box mechanics, and a level of accessibility that means players can jump right into the action.
0 kommentar(er)
