I’m not sure I’ve seen a more original premise for a city planner than “build a frontier boomtown populated entirely by retro-futuristic steam-powered robots” in a long time. This makes SteamWorld Build a refreshing drink of water in the trackless desert compared to many, many builders chasing the trends we’ve seen over the past few years – and while you’re building the city above, it stands out because you’re simultaneously mining the mine below for mineral resources and pieces of ancient technology that can be used to escape your dying planet. It’s a short, sweet city builder that doesn’t do too much new beyond that setting, but uses the parts it has to make a fun whole that I know I’ll be coming back to in the future.
As they have been for a decade, SteamWorld games have a really well-established palette of character designs, colors, and even sounds to draw from. The result is a game world, stylistically on par with much larger, more established franchises – such as the Warcraft universe – that adapts very well to different genres without losing its visual distinctiveness, personality and setting. That’s still the case in SteamWorld Build, where the goofy stylized robots chugging along to the same loud country-western guitar tracks with the same goofy voices are as charming as ever. It’s a planet of steam robots where everyone has an accent like a Norse pretending to be from the Old West and, by God, still works here.
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The main rules of SteamWorld Build are nothing new to the city builder. You provide services to citizens and produce goods, both of which allow you to eventually upgrade those same citizens to higher levels – from settlers to engineers to aristobots to scientists – and unlock new buildings that offer even more stuff for the next level of bots . If you’re looking for a deep simulation of every citizen’s needs, you won’t find anything like it here, but simplicity is a strength in its own way.
Fans of series like Anno will pick up on what SteamWorld Build does pretty quickly and will almost certainly enjoy it, as will those like me who remember the old Impressions City Building series. Services are routed to your metal people via a basic distance system: everything moves along the roads you lay out, and any house within range of the service building immediately has access to it. Goods are produced at a certain rate, and you can stockpile some, but mostly you’ll rely on as much coming in as going out, selling the surplus at your town’s train station.
But it’s not entirely clear-cut, as your city simultaneously spreads underground. You will recruit miners, prospectors and mechanics to excavate, mine and improve your mining operations. At first you’ll focus on finding easy-to-remove chunks of ore in the ground and rocks, but later you’ll have to supply consumable tools like picks and drills to remove harder rock obstacles. And while the resources you’ll find above initially keep the mine running, they’re eventually backfired as the town needs the oil, water, and old technology you mine below. There’s a simple but satisfying cycle: Engineers from the city help you recruit mechanics to work underneath, who then install and maintain auto-mining machines in the resource veins you find, growing your tunnels further so you can expand bigger and faster, both higher and below.
Eventually, you’ll need security bots to keep the underground workings up and running and protect them from any hideous bugs and ancient threats you may discover. These will help protect your miners, but you can also build traps and towers to deter enemies and protect your static base. It’s a sort of light-hearted Dungeon Keeper, where threats tend not to be threats until you deliberately dig them out, allowing you to take battles at your own pace – at least at first. That’s in addition to a welcome range of difficulty settings that can cause enemies to do anything from jerks to a true constant threat. It’s a strong design decision for SteamWorld Build’s low-key city builder, where devastating attacks can end up being more of an annoyance than a challenge. The fact that it uses enemies as lying cops to smooth out the pace of progression instead of a constant gauntlet to worry about is nice.
As you dig and build, the overground station is also regularly visited by aliens. In classic old western fashion, it’s a source of both money and things you can’t do yourself: building upgrades. Most buildings have one or two open slots to upgrade them, such as warehouses getting more storage space and workers to transport goods, resource producers getting the chance to make bonus items, or even just new picks and guns for mine bots. You can also exchange excess items for cash, which is nice. These updates are very simple, not complex enough to provide different build strategies for each new run, but they contribute to your experience in a key way: for example, if you don’t like figuring out the ideal production figures, you can just invest in production bonuses and never think about it again. their inefficient cactus juice farms.
From start to finish, it only took me about eight hours to build a city, dig mines, and build a rocket to escape SteamWorld. It’s a quick and easy city builder, which is both its greatest strength and what holds it back from being much bigger. There are five maps with different terrain, but the decisions you have to make while doing so won’t change much. You will create the same thing every time with slight variations. Working your way through the production chain and exploring these maps is a lot of fun, but it’s just one kind of fun, not a deep and engaging puzzle that unfolds over time and pulls you in deeper.
It really gets a lot of beginner-friendliness and affordability out of its decision to embrace simplicity. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that the developer of The Station has actually managed to provide competent controller support, unlike many other city builders who manage to do so only vaguely.
That also doesn’t mean there aren’t any unpredictable elements or new things to unlock and do the longer you play. Each map is playable with a randomly generated underground layer, which is a nice touch that keeps the mine building fresh. Completing the map also unlocks ongoing upgrades to future cities’ infrastructure, such as an upgraded train station where supplies arrive more frequently. Nothing special, but it’s a bit of a victory lap that cuts down on work that would be unpleasant to repeat. It’s also a space-saving convenience that frees up time to make your cities beautiful decorations. Nothing like a neatly planned rail line to keep steambot morale up.