SteamWorld Build [Review]
Image: The Station / Thunderful
SteamWorld Build is the latest game in The Station’s SteamWorld series. SteamWorld games are set in an Old West inspired steam operated world, where all the residents are robots. It’s a charming universe, and SteamWorld Build’s use of it is no exception.
In this game, a mysterious bot called Core wants you to dig up old technology buried in a long abandoned mine in order to be able to escape the dying planet. The story is sparse, told in an opening scene and little bits of dialogue as you reach certain milestones. It’s just window dressing on a very satisfying gameplay loop.
Image: The Station / Thunderful
SteamWorld Build combines multiple genres. It’s a city builder and economy sim mixed with light tower defense. This is represented by the game’s literal multi layer approach—the surface with its town, and the underground with its mine. You begin the game with a defunct train station, some planks of wood, and some cash. You must build out your town with the train station as its beating heart; every building must be connected by road to the train station. The mine comes into play once you pass certain milestones in the town.
You can build residences that are upgradable between four classes: workers, engineers, aristocrats, and scientist. Each class upgrades to the next, and different factories and services require operation by specific classes, so you must be careful to balance your population. Each class has a set of desired goods and services. The service buildings—general stores, saloons, casinos, etc.—must be within a certain distance of the class that wants it. Making sure you optimize placement of residences near their required services takes careful planning, especially since as you upgrade the residents’ class they might outgrow a service and want a different one. Each road upgrade in the game makes this a little easier since it extends the range of coverage. The game helpfully highlights the distance of effects very clearly.
Image: The Station / Thunderful
You must produce goods to satisfy each class as well as to produce more elaborate kinds of goods. At the root of this you have to gather raw resources such as wood, sand, scrap, and ironium from the surface and the mine. Buildings that produce goods can be placed anywhere, as long as they’re within the radius of a warehouse, though there’s an interesting element—a steam factory that increases production for nearby buildings—that makes you want to optimize your urban planning.
It’s important to manage the production economy of your town, since some items, like coal, are used to make multiple goods. SteamWorld Build has a really handy ledger feature that lists every item you make with its supply and demand. If you produce too little of something, you might have to build up more factories for it, or even build up the entire supply chain because that item depletes supply that you need for producing different items. If you produce too much, you can always set up trade deals at the train station for other goods or for cash.
Image: The Station / Thunderful
The mine, where you must search for old technology parts over three levels, is also key to the production that keeps your town running smoothly as some resources are only found there. Managing the mine works differently than the city; you’ve got miners, prospectors, mechanics, and security whose numbers are managed by how much floor space you buy for each. The same system is used for determining how many mining machines and defenses you may place. You manually direct miners on where to dig. Resource veins must be mined by prospectors and soon after by machines built and repaired by the mechanics. I had the most fun building conveyor belt systems to automatically ferry resources from the machines to the mine entrance.
Security doesn’t come into play until the 2nd floor. Security, like the defensive devices you can place (grenade cannons, flame throwers, and thumpers) will deal with enemies automatically. This is where we encounter the tower defense mechanics, when enemies spawn from hives to attack your mine. To me, this part of the game feels like a bit of an afterthought. Variety of enemy types and defenses are both limited and setting up the defense feels like a chore to deal with an annoyance. Considering there are just three levels to the mine and only two have combat, this bit could have easily been cut without much of a loss. It seems like the tower defense concept was the least developed of this game’s three major ideas and comes off a bit half baked.
Image: The Station / Thunderful
I loved SteamWorld Build’s polished UI and presentation. Aside from being pretty, the UI is very intuitive. Some options are repeated in the UI as a means to remind the player how resources are connected. For example, you can find the button to build glass blowers both under the engineers’ moonshine and scientists’ lab equipment. This made things very easy to navigate. There are some convenience features that would have been nice as the city grows, such as a means to center the view on the train station, or a button to automatically cycle between each building you’ve built of a type. Without that you need a good memory or a good eye to find things on the map, because while each structure looks great, they can be hard to tell apart when you’ve got a sea of them. Otherwise, everything worked smoothly and intuitively, even using a PS5 controller when this genre is usually mouse driven. One detail in particular that gave me joy every time was the bouncing jiggle effect given to the ghosted buildings as you move them around in the construction UI. Everything in the game feels very tactile, and that’s a rarity.
My biggest qualm with this game was the length of the experience. Once you find all six pieces of tech and build it, the run is essentially over, and it feels like it ends just when things are really running on all cylinders. I would have liked the mine to go deeper and offer more challenges. The game has five available environments, but aside from cosmetic differences they all play the same way. I played all the way through on two of them.
SteamWorld Build is a great city builder that’s very streamlined for gamers like me that usually aren’t into more complex city sims. If you’re a hardcore strategy game player this may be too easy of an experience for you, but it was perfect for me. It was just over a little too quickly.
SteamWorld Build is available now on PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and XBox Series X|S.
