I am surprisingly addicted to this little, casual city builder! The story isn't great, but the gameplay had me playing later than I wanted to just saying, "okay, I'll just do this next thing and head to bed." only to find it had been another hour.

I'm a Steamworld fan, I've liked every game in the series, except maybe the RPG (and that's just because I'm not the biggest fan of turn based RPG's, especially with cards...). So I was already looking forward to checking this one out. However, I wasn't expecting to finish within the week it came out. I figured I would chip away at it every now and then, but I found myself not wanting to stop and see what was next on the build list!

You're building a town of robots trying to unearth "ancient" rocket tech to escape the planet. The story is presented in such a way that it wasn't very exciting. Little characters pop up to talk to each other, or they use still frames to voice overs. The voice overs range from good to kind of awful and while I have always loved the Steamworld art style, being presented several still shots of the robots talking is pretty boring.

However, the gameplay I found I couldn't put down. You start building your town with workers and off you go harvest resources of all types to make them happy. If they're not happy, then they will not work and your towns progress will slow to a crawl, so you need to keep up on it.

Then you also end up finding the local mine where you find more resources and the gameplay becomes more of a light RTS game. Yes, enemies form the depths will attack your miners and you have to keep tabs. I thought it was super cool that they were able to combine these genres together.

I won't spoil it here, but everything keeps evolving and tiering up and you eventually are able to automate certain things but getting to that point is the fun. The ability to say "Wow, I started with nothing and look what I have now. And it only took a few hours!" I love that.

All I can say is after finishing my first town, I immediately started another town in a new environment to build and see how fast I could tier up my new town.

If you're looking for a good city builder game to get your feet wet in the genre, this is the one. I hope this one gets some DLC with some new towns and achievements to grab!

Reviewed on Dec 09, 2023


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