The SteamWorld series has a long history rich with experimentation: there are Metroidvanias, turn-based tactics, a role-playing card game, and it all started with a simple tower defense for the Nintendo DSi. The new project from the Swedish studio The Station, titled SteamWorld Build, fits perfectly into this diverse company. Once again, we have a bright and stylish game set in a steampunk Wild West, starring cute humanoid robots, but this time the genre is new — a city-building simulator.
Inhabited by Robots
The steam bots inhabiting this once-flourishing, now dying planet want to get off it as soon as possible. There are plenty of stars in the sky, and there’s room for everyone in space. The only catch is building the necessary spacecraft for the journey. Although the future star travelers find a mine with rocket parts hidden deep within, they still need to reach them, dig them up, bring them to the surface, and assemble something resembling a spaceship from that junk. This is the main goal of the campaign (though you can continue playing after achieving it): find and dig up six parts of an ancient rocket, fuel it, and leave the dying planet.
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Unlike previous installments, the story in SteamWorld Build plays a very secondary role — which is understandable given the genre. Essentially, the entire narrative here consists of a couple of cutscenes, dialogue scenes between several characters during key events, and hints from the tutorial mode. Overall, the storytelling level is frankly childish, even if the writers tried to surprise with a twist.
Digging
At first glance, the gameplay seems as simple as the story — straightforward, if not primitive. But this impression is deceptive: the more the city develops, the more attention the processes that sustain it require. However, there’s no need to be afraid, because it’s impossible to lose here. At worst, your settlement will simply stop developing.
The gameplay is standard: build houses for residents, place buildings that extract and process resources to satisfy the needs of your charges. The steam bots have class segregation, which determines their set of needs. While ordinary workers only need water, coal, repairs, a nearby store, and access to the railway station (which serves as the city center and a place for trading resources), engineers, aristobots, and scientists have a wider and more diverse list of “wants”. But they are also more skilled — without engineers, for example, you can’t start a distillery. This affects city planning: separate residential districts emerge for each robot type, and when placing resource-processing buildings, you have to consider the road network. Overall, the system is simple and understandable.
This description of the gameplay could end here, if not for the existence of an underground level — remember that the robots had to go underground for the rocket? The underground realm has its own laws, so the gameplay there is drastically different from what happens on the surface. In fact, besides the spaceship parts themselves, there is much that is interesting and useful underground, particularly valuable resources that robots can only find there: scrap iron, gold nuggets, rubies, oil, water, gas, and much more. Their extraction happens in a completely different way: you can simply dig them out of the rock (the “cube” of earth disappears, freeing up space), and for some types, there are veins with infinite supply. The workers underground are also divided into classes: miners dig, prospectors extract resources, engineers build and repair mechanisms, and guards fight bugs and evil robots, which serve as enemies here.
You have to act completely differently underground: the action is somewhat reminiscent of Dungeon Keeper, except there’s no giant hand instead of a cursor. Otherwise, it’s very similar: a cubic grid map, indirect control of workers, building turrets and traps…
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
What do people primarily expect from a city-building strategy? The answer, in my opinion, revolves around the following concepts: production chains, understandable event logic, a convenient interface, and visual appeal.
Production chains in SteamWorld Build do exist (although it might not seem that way at first), but they can hardly be called extensive. Most of them appear closer to the final stages of the game, and they don’t actually force you to rack your brains over optimization — by that time, you’ll likely have an excess of resources anyway, so you can freely place factories and other buildings as you wish.
