Steampunk robot wild-west town builder with a short campaign.
I never played the original SteamWorld game, I saw the aesthetic and thought “that’s neat” but never really gave it more attention than that. This one landed on my lap through Humble Monthly though, so I figured I’d give it a go. From my understanding, the original was a clone of Motherlode, but this game is nothing like that. This time you’re building a town.
It is a very small game, with very simple supply chain things that you have to solve, which is a nice change of pace from the more significantly complicated logistics games I’ve played such as Surviving Mars or Infraspace. There also isn’t really any of the factory game style stuff either. Most of your interaction with the town builder aspect of the game boils down to 3 main things.
- Place a resource gathering building in range of a resource to have income of that resource.
- Place a production building within range of a warehouse or a corresponding resource gathering building to convert one resource into another.
- Place houses and services within range of eachother to increase your labour force.
A lot of services don’t require resources to work, only proximity, so satisfying your pops is pretty simple all things considered. They do also need consumable resources as a persistant drain amount. Workers need charcoal and water, Engineers need moonshine, and so on. So you do have to pay a little bit of attention to your supply chain. Most of it boils down to watching the helpful table the game gives you, finding any red numbers, and building the corresponding building for it. All in all, it’s possibly the most approachable management sim I’ve ever played.
The other half of the gameplay is in the game’s mining system. To get workforce in the mines, you need to build a corresponding Quarters building for the specific worker type, miner, prospector, guard, or engineer. The buildings don’t have to be squares, or even densely packed, they just have to be contiguous. It’s generally better to extend your existing quarters than building a new one where possible, as you then need fewer tiles per new worker, and they can share equipment.
Miners can dig out walls, clear floors, and reinforce walls. They only clear walls you mark for demolition, so you’ll almost never stumble into something you’re not ready for. Prospectors can then tink away at the ore veins you stumble into, until you unlock engineers and can then put mining machines on those veins, in which case your prospectors will cart materials back to the elevator. Guards defend you from hostiles, but you won’t encounter any until the second layer of the mine, so you can chill and get the hang of it on floor 1.
The goal of the game is to build and fuel the rocket. Building it isn’t like Factorio where you make the components and put them together though. The rocket is split into 6 components, and they are all buried in the mine and need to be found instead. Excavating a piece of mining equipment requires a minimum number of miners, and on the latter floors, sufficient defense turrets and guards to defend them from the enemy waves that extraction summons. You can always cancel extraction if you get overwhelmed though.
My first run of the game took me about 6 hours over two evenings to complete. It is a surprisingly short campaign, but in a way I kind of like that about it. You don’t have to commit to large scale production chains and evenings upon evenings of calculating material ratios and building layouts.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2134770 £19.99
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/steamworld-build £24.99
Switch: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/steamworld-build £24.99
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