Industry simulation at it’s finest both in depth and accessible to all levels of players however will the wheels fall off in time?
As a huge simcity fan and many other strategy and tycoon games over the years i’ve come to appreciate the details in these types of games and how they keep you coming back for more and willing restarts just to improve the build you have previously gone with.
Rise of Industry at face value is simple, gather resources, grow crops, industrialise the crops to goods and set up a logistics system to get your hard earned goods to the stores and make the big bucks. Now if that’s all you want to do then as per any game of this type you will have relative success, make a few $ and be merrily on your way, but for the enthusiasts amongst us this won’t be enough! a robust logistics system and efficient road system will be the goal where you will no doubt expand and elaborate your system to rail and the zeppelin (yeah you get to use zeppelin)
You have 3 modes to get stuck into, Career with 3 difficulty settings where startup capital differ and markets vary to a immediately open freeplay mode and custom games where you have a limited number of options (see below) to vary to your style of play.
Before you do though I highly recommend you play the tutorial for hints and tips on how to start and pay close attention to building placement and get planning for your career game.
In career my preferred mode you pick from one of the 4 specialisations and you are given additional unlock points to get you off to a good start but be sure to get all areas of the tree growing together otherwise you’ll have loads of resources but no plantations and industry to do anything high value with and be stuck on limited funds for a long time. Be mindful of your money too as time goes on the costs go up and buildings required more upkeep along with more early tech tree buildings to fulfill the requirements for the more exotic goods to be made.
You may be tempted to build endless number of syphons and farms to begin with or focus on being a lumberjack but either way be prepared to restart some games once you learn the intricacies of the game and get to grips with the required number of trucks and distances involved as if you don’t you’ll be losing money fast and wishing you paid attention (not that i did this honest)
I’ve found the best strategy is to keep the game in a medium speed until you have a solid setup then expand as you see fit ensuring you are making money by adding and removing trucks as required to ensure good distribution and making sure you don’t just overstock on resources wasting yet more money as sorting it out when you have pushing a hundred buildings can be a real pain in the arse (didn’t make that mistake either)
But When you get to grips with it and make good use of the recipe book available to you planning a future production line and have it located well with good routes and space to expand when needed you’ll be making big bucks.
1 last career tip, you can only seem to have 1 career going at any time as autosave overwrites previous saves every 5 minutes, plenty of workarounds here but check your settings and don’t lose a 5hr game due to wanting to show people the early stages of the game (again I didn’t do this, your seeing a pattern aren’t you)
The game offers many in depth options and information such as the global market information allowing a good overview of where you may want to focus your industry, yet certain aspects are lacking such as which building is making how much money, now perhaps this is by design but for me it’s a missing feature i would like to see added. (please Dapper please add this)
For the controls this is your typical strategy setup with multiple ways of doing just about everything, panning the map can be done with the traditional WASD keys, the Up down, left and right or even the mouse.Click to select buildings and objects to find out more information and place items, rotating with the R key. Luckily everything is explained in the tutorial so even newcomers to the genre will find it easy to get to grips with. But in the settings there are options to make changes if you have your own preferred setup.
Now as a alpha game released on Steam be prepared for the odd bug and please support the future of the game here by reporting it, there is an option in the game to do this as I did. But to be honest in my play throughs i only had 1 so it’s pretty stable and has hours and hours of gameplay to get stuck into however there are a few annoying parts such as the graphics, running every setting on high it still felt very unpolished which i can appreciate but did expect a bit more to be honest, trees are just pyramid shapes and lack any depth but it is forgivable as the menus are where you spend a lot of your time.
Sounds are surprisingly good and even the background music didn’t annoy me but it’s fitting to the tycoon genre really and like me may find it a good time to catch up on some new tunes on your music players. Vehicles and buildings are good but I didn’t find myself taking extreme notice of them as the game kept me busy perfecting my industry.
SUMMARY
You’ll be coming back for more time and time again if this is your game genre, it’s inexpensive and Dapper have been really good with listening to people and rolling out their updates so if this continues I can see nothing worse than a already good game getting better and better with more and more features becoming available and added. This game could score higher in due course but for now it’s a solid alpha and progressing very nicely.
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments!