Reviews:
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Taking the SteamWorld franchise in a very different direction, mixing together city management with a bit of Dungeon Keeper
I’ve continued to be pleased with the ways the team behind the SteamWorld series have pushed themselves to continue to be creative and maintain excellence while moving into different genres. Now having taken on the metroidvania, strategy, and roguelike deckbuilding genres they’ve landed on more of a city-building sim… and thankfully they’ve done so in a way that has demonstrated their commitment to trying to do things their own way. First and foremost this comes in the way you’ll be doing more traditional city-building on the surface, trying to build the critical infrastructure you’ll need to grow and prosper, while down below your focus is a bit more on exploration and keeping your workers safe from a variety of dangers. You’ll absolutely need to shift between them with some regularity, keeping on top of some very different concerns as you continue to expand your borders and your concerns regarding keeping your people happy. While I do think this would probably play more easily on a PC, I’ll give credit to the developers for making it play pretty well with a controller, though it does initially take a little getting used to. Your first run will probably feel like it’s going well enough to a point, but once you begin to understand how to better space out and arrange clusters of buildings to meet the needs of your workers a second pass will generally yield better results. While not perfect this once again proves that the SteamWorld team has the capabilities to pull off whatever they set their minds to.
Justin Nation, Score:Nindie Choice! [8.0]