SteamWorld Build: A Short Plot, Some Surprises, No Long-Term Appeal

Genre
Strategy

Publisher
Thunderful Publishing

Developer
The Station

Minimum Requirements

Processor Intel Core i5-8400 2.8 GHz / AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, video card with DirectX 12 support and 2 or 4 GB of memory, for example NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 / AMD Radeon RX 560, 4 GB on hard drive

Recommended Requirements

Processor Intel Core i7-9700F 3.0 GHz / AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3.6 GHz, 8 GB RAM, graphics card with DirectX 12 support and 6 or 8 GB memory, such as NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 / AMD Radeon RX Vega56

release date
December 1, 2023

Age limit
From 7 years

Localization
Text

Platforms

PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Official site

Played on Xbox Series S

Typically, in city-planning simulators there is no plot as such, and the passage stretches out over long weeks and months: while you build the districts, while you satisfy the basic needs of the residents, while you build the roads, and in some games the consequences of weather phenomena also need to be corrected. In SteamWorld Build, the structure is completely different – there is a story campaign, and it lasts about eight hours, after which you can say goodbye to the game. Atypical for the genre, but a non-standard approach is not always good.

⇡#Life of steambots

To begin, we select the difficulty level and map. Whichever option you take, the plot will be the same: the heroes know about ancient devices buried deep underground, and therefore are building entire cities in order to prepare the infrastructure for successfully diving into the mines and searching for aircraft parts. With its help they will leave the planet. The story is not the most interesting, and it is presented as if the developers themselves were bored with writing dialogues. It exists primarily so that SteamWorld has a progression system, thanks to which this city-planning simulator is accessible to all categories of players – both experienced managers and those who are new to the genre.

It’s always nice to zoom out and take a look at your town.

At first we have nothing but a station and a railway. At first, we do routine things: we arrange houses for workers, lay paths to the station, build a store. Then – a logging site to obtain logs and a sawmill to make boards, cactus farms so that the residents would have something to drink… These buildings are needed not only to establish production, but also to meet the needs of the settlers. You can build another house to increase the total number of workers, but if there is no store and hospital nearby, the house will be empty – additional people will move in only after the desired buildings appear.

It is also necessary to satisfy needs in order to retrain workers – for example, to make them engineers. This opens up access to new buildings and technologies, but the residents also have more needs – in order for them to work at full capacity, it is necessary to locate additional enterprises and factories. This is how the progress system is structured here – local steambots (as upright walking robotic inhabitants are called) are becoming more and more demanding, the player is only required to place the buildings they ask for near their homes.

Residents of ordinary houses can be upgraded to engineers with two clicks. Just remember that the city also needs ordinary workers

At the same time, situations never arise when you start to panic because of a small amount of money, stalled processes, idle factories, or something else like that. Profits are always in perfect order, taxes are paid regularly, and if some enterprise brings in little money, well, it doesn’t matter, it won’t have a significant impact on the overall economy, everything else works. This seems to be good, but because of this you don’t treat the local residents as living beings – you don’t even want to watch what they do. Very quickly the game turns into a banal chase for numbers, and you perform all the actions automatically: you put a house, put a store next to it and everything else, and you don’t touch this house again until you move to the next stage, at which the residents suddenly need saloons and saunas .

It becomes more fun after about an hour of play, when access to the mines opens up. This is a kind of game within a game, closer to fans of the SteamWorld series. In a sense, it’s also a simulator, but not as large-scale: we set up barracks for the miners, and use the cursor to highlight the walls that they will destroy in search of minerals. We collect gold nuggets, build automatic scrap collectors, look for rubies, and also put supports in unstable areas so that in the event of a collapse someone will not be killed.

The game tells you where collapses may occur

⇡#Deeper and deeper

Soon the two halves of the game become closely connected. We extract metal in mines – on the surface it can be used to create magnetic tracks along which robots move much faster than usual. We extract iron – we can build a sheet metal production plant. At the same time, there is no need to manually transfer resources from the bowels of the earth to the city or to build any connections for a long time – the materials are common to everyone and immediately go into a common treasury. I’m also pleased with how easy it is to switch between the mines and the surface – press two buttons at the same time and instantly be transported to where you need to go.

It is much more interesting to observe the processes underground. Only you indicate what the miners should do – without your orders they will not even clear the collapses. You choose what minerals they will mine and where, and then build bridges so that workers can explore previously inaccessible places. You interact with hidden chests that contain resources, money, and sometimes bonus items that can be applied to any selected building – they will either speed up production processes, or reduce consumption, or help in some other way.

Over time, radars will become available showing interesting places in the mine

And as they progress through the story (that is, searching for parts of the aircraft), the miners will descend to deeper levels, where there is even more to explore. There, enemies appear, like worms and beetles, against which you need to build defensive machines, and conditions become not the most convenient due to creeping stems. They need to be burned out with flamethrowers in order to free up cells for buildings and prevent steambots from falling into slowing traps.

In general, there are plenty of surprises here – in the mines you unlock teleports and conveyors for faster movement of workers and resources, and on the surface you can engage in trade and exchange unnecessary resources for the ones you need. As you progress, the possibilities become more and more, but after about eight hours the plot turns out to be completed and there seems to be nothing to do in the game. Maps are limited in size, all processes are more or less established, there are no more goals – you can close the game and do something else.

The passage will take even less time if you lay out paved paths everywhere and speed up the time in the game

At the same time, SteamWorld Build doesn’t try very hard to keep the player glued to the screen with new options. You can start the passage again by choosing a different map, but only the surroundings will change – instead of the desert from a cowboy western, you will find yourself, for example, in a desert with fossils and huge skeletons of dinosaurs. You can change the difficulty level, you can turn off training and completely remove plot dialogues, but the game will remain exactly the same – you’ll just complete it even faster, because you’ve already learned from your mistakes and know what goals you need to strive for. This will be interesting to some, but further development of an already created city would bring much more pleasure.

***

SteamWorld Build is a city-building simulator made primarily for fans of the series, and not for fans of the genre. Therefore, there is a short storyline, but there is nothing that would make you want to continue playing after its completion. Overall, the game is not bad and even enjoyable – the way the construction of enterprises on the surface and the process of extracting resources in the mines are intertwined makes the gameplay exciting. But excessive simplicity and the absence of goals other than plot ones (as well as purely cosmetic differences between the maps) lead to the fact that after the first playthrough there is practically no point in returning to the world of hard-working steambots.

Advantages:

• nice visual style in the spirit of past games in the series;
• an interesting combination of a classic city-planning simulator and a simulator of a team of miners;
• the progress system helps you avoid getting confused and always tells you what to do next;
• Convenient controls on a gamepad – you open the necessary menus instantly, and you can be transported from the city to the mine with a couple of clicks.

Flaws:

• the gameplay is too simple – you rarely have to monitor the flow of money;
• the miners are much more interesting to watch than the city residents;
• After completing the game there is nothing to do – all goals have been achieved, and on the remaining maps you do the same thing.

Graphics

Nice, stylized graphics that don’t slip into complete “cartooniness”—the settlement looks charming.

Sound

The music complements the action well, but, as is the case with many city-planning simulators, very soon you turn on something of your own – for example, a podcast. Yes, because of this you may miss some plot lines here, but the story is not so great.

Single player game

There is only one mode, but there are several maps – however, all the differences are only in the surroundings.

Estimated completion time

8 hours for the first playthrough. Subsequent ones will be faster – if, of course, you have the desire to go through the game again.

Group game

Not provided.

General impression

A charming city-planning simulator, which is spoiled by its short duration and excessive simplicity of gameplay.

Rating: 7.0/10

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