SteamWorld Build Review

thesixthaxis.com:

The end of the world is coming and there is only one hope of survival: getting off of it. That’s the premise of the city building and dungeon crawler hybrid SteamWorld Build. It is the latest entry to SteamWorld series, picking yet another new genre compared to previous entries, and challenging you to build a town that satisfies everyone’s needs while mining for resources and rocket parts to get off the planet.

You can pick from one of five maps to play on in SteamWorld Build, each changing the surface level on which you build up your bustling frontier town. The first thing you will need to do is get some workers by building some houses and a road to link them to a train station – in fact, everything you build needs to be connected to a road that leads back to the station.

Workers are the first group of citizens you unlock and they have quite simple demands. All they need are places like a general store, service station, and a cactus farm, while being provided work at a logger, lumbermill and charcoal factory. Those are your first main resources for your town. However, as the town grows, three more groups of citizens are gradually unlocked: engineers, aristocrats, and scientists.

The way to get these groups into your town is not as simple as just building them some houses. They’ll only come when their specific needs are met and the resources are available that can upgrade homes to the next group in turn. You’re effectively gentrifying your town from worker homes to engineer home, aristocrats and then scientists in turn. As each group is unlocked more buildings are unlocked that create new resources, as well as provide for the needs of the people. However, these buildings need raw materials to create resources, and those