Times Of Progress is an elegant, focussed city builder set during the Industrial Revolution

rockpapershotgun.com:

Times Of Progress is a special game for me, because is the first news tip I have ever received from Sin Vega, Prime Minister of Strategy Gaming, way back in spring this year. Sin once described writing news articles for our former news editor Alice0 (RPS in peace) as like practising backflips in front of the kung fu master. Writing about a new city builder at Sin's suggestion is like being invited to budget the development of Londinium by Julius Caesar.

The terror of screwing it up - together with other, more trivial distractions, like international games industry conferences- has stopped me from writing about Times Of Progress for months. Today I bite the bullet, and emerge from my lodgings to issue a hesitant speech to the masses, hoping like hell that Caesar is too preoccupied with the latest Gaul uprising to notice my errors.

For starters, that introductory analogy is from the wrong millennium. Times Of Progress is set during the Industrial Revolution - the dawn of steam engines, trade unions and high-density urban housing. The first thing that grabs you about it is the presentation and aesthetic. We are in procedurally generated Isometric Land, with roads and railways binding together diamond-shaped town layouts. The buildings, terrain types and overall colour scheme are pleasantly clean - pale earth, red brick, green hill - but it isn't barren. There are some engrossing animated flourishes such as smoke plumes, and the way houses slowly fatten up into more complex dwellings.

Nonetheless, you might be tempted to call Times Of Progress "minimalist". It definitely seems more condensed than a lot of city-builders, but there are systems aplenty, including a few that spring more directly from the choice of period.

Take scientific innovations and new technologies, such as typewriters, water frames or electrolysis. You don't simply assign scientists to research them yourself. Rather, they unlock according to a timeline as part of the wider Industrial