Is there a genre that the SteamWorld series can’t turn its hand to? Since its breakout platformer SteamWorld Dig, it’s morphed into a side-scrolling XCOM-like, dealt out an RPG deck-builder and now it’s getting its construction tools out for SteamWorld Build: a city-builder with a twist.
SteamWorld Build is the first game in the series from someone other than series creators Image & Form, though it absolutely fits in with the familiar tone and style. The game opens with a quirky cutscene as Jack Clutchsprocket and his daughter-bot Astrid gaze upon the stars, dreaming of a way to escape their dying planet and find a new home. That’s when a clearly evil AI ball pipes up from a nearby cart, instructing them to dig down and unearth the ancient technology that will facilitate this interstellar objective.
This narrative conceit lends itself very nicely to a game that is a city-builder on the one hand and a mining game on the other. You start your first mission on the surface, building up around an abandoned train station. It’s a nice and light experience, quickly placing housing for an ever-growing workforce and setting up a warehouse, forestry and lumber mill to produce the wood they will need.
Growth from here is gradual as you worth through a series of milestones. Repairing the train station, for example, allows for trading and acquiring building improvements. The charcoal kiln is followed by cactus farms, sand sifting and glass-blowing to pipe moonshine through to saloons. That then allows you to turn worker housing into engineer housing – so long as you can fulfil all of their building and supply requirements to keep them happy. This is where the game really starts to open up the options for industry. Next step? Gentrification!
Twinned and co-dependent with this overground expansion is the underground mining; but where SteamWorld Dig mixed mining with a Metroidvania-style platformer, SteamWorld Build adds a Dungeon Keeper-style vibe.
The goal is to hollow out the underground areas, hunting for rare gems and precious metals for simple trading, while also hunting key resource veins that can be tapped for a persistent supply to your growing industry on the surface.
In order to do this, you need to set out quarters and space for miners, prospectors, surveyors and mechanics. These aren’t buildings, per se, but simply assigned spaces with at least 9 square tiles per worker. You’ll need to carve out significant chunks of space between impenetrable bedrock to facilitate this as you keep pushing out from the mineshaft to reveal more of the underworld. Some of that even depends on finding explosive charges to open up new tracts of the underworld to delve into.
It’s almost surprising how close this overarching drive and exploratory mining feels to the tone of the mining adventure of SteamWorld Dig, even if it’s a tone that comes through a thoroughly different style of play. There’s a big chunk of narrative to dredge up through the mining as well, hunting for that ancient technology to fuel your steampunk space race, but there’s also plenty of dangers lurking down there for you to deal with too.
With the two such distinctive sides to the game, they can feel a bit detached at times. Once you head underground to go mining, you’re so very directly involved in what’s going on, while the above ground town simply ticks over. You will be dragged back and forth regularly, though, when you need to push out a big expansion of housing, tap into a new resource that you’ve secured or beef up your production lines.
SteamWorld Build does seem to do a good job of balancing the depth and accessibility of this, though. The UI is generally quick and easy to get to grips with, whether it’s checking if your citizens are being kept happy, seeing how far a resource building’s influence can reach, or quickly assigning mining projects. There’s no doubt plenty of micromanaging that you can do, or more aesthetic city planning jobs, but you can quickly get things thrown together if you’re just chasing the objectives and narrative moments.
I’m certainly looking forward to seeing how the rest of the game comes together with more missions, settings and a lightly twisted narrative to bring into the light, but once again, SteamWorld Build is showing off just how adaptable Image & Form’s steampunk setting is.
