Steamworld Build is yet another genre shift in the line of Steamworld games. This time, the cartoon-ish steam-powered western robots have taken to forgotten lands, where they plan to set up shop and develop a new town of th𝐆eir own. The end goal: dig up spaceship parts from an abandoned mineshaft nearby and escape to the stars.

While most folks know Steamworld for Steamworld Dig, a procedurally generated action adventure game, the series got it's start as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a tower defense game.

At its core, ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚSteamworld Build is a classic city builder experience. You earn money and resources and then use them to construct buildings. Some structures will raise your population for a specific type of robot, some generate resources, and others craft entirely new𝕴 resources from existing ones.

The first thing I noticed was the undeniable charmꦑ of the game’s art and presentation. The steampunk-meets-western style of the Steamworld games has been well-realized over the years. It also translates beautifully into a 3D space, retaining the blocky, over-the-top design of the machines the series is known for. It all comes together to create colorful, quirky, and cohesive grapꦍhics that look good from every angle.

One thing that distinguishes Steamworld Build from other city builders is its Milestone progression system. ෴You start with one type of Steambot, the worker, and a small handful of buildings. To reach the next Milestone, you have to increase the population, which is as simple as placing a few more houses down. This, in turn, unlocks more buildings while making the happiness requirements for the workers a little bit more complex.

At first, this felt basic and slow. Creating full sustainability was as simple as placing three buildings vaguely close to each other, whi🌜ch allowed for expansion far beyond what I needed. Did I need more wood? One forester building later and that was solved. Sure, production lines were happening. But they were too easy to establish. It would stay this way for a while, prompting the phrase ‘Baby’s First City Builder’ to occasionally run through my mind.

But with each new Milestone achieved, that complexity grew just a little bit larger. Now I had one more resource to figure out and one more production chain to establish. I had to be mindful not to steal the resources I was already using in previous chains. I had unlocked new buildings for the underground, allowing me to progress the story and access new areas and resources, while th𓆉e Steambots grew more and more picky. Before I knew it, I was on Milestone 15, with several haphazardly placed production chains and a sizable town built on duct tape and dreams.

This is where Steamworld Build shines brightest. I was unlocking new buildings, machines, and Steambots at a fairly consistent pace. Each Milestone gave me both something new to play with 🐼and what I needed to progress further. It put the rate of engagement in my own hands. So I never became overwhelmed by my options, despite unlocking new things more than 12 hours in. I found the expanding web of resource lines enga🐈ging, though I can also see how it would be perceived as tedious, especially further into the game.

Fortunately, there is a degree of forgiveness in the game’s design. Destroying a building provides a full refund; you can relocate buildings for ♐free; resource nodes never run out, and you can purchase missing resources from the train station. They provide a lot of small details that help eliminate any sense of regret from your decisions.

The other, more obvious, thing that Steamworld Build does differently is the underground mine. While the surface world is always the same, limited to one of six pre-generated maps 🐟to choose from, the mines below are randomly generated. Instead of constructing whole buildings, I built dynamically sized quarters to house miners, prospectors, and more. I could then issue commands like digging, building excavators, or harvesting resources from nodes.

There are multiple floors you can find and unlock. Each one raises the stakes of the last, intro🔯ducing new resources to gather and greater dangers to prepare for. It also drives the main plot of looking for rocket ship parts. This not only provided yet another environment to develop and manage (and more buildings and machines to unlock accordingly), it gave the game a sense of exploration that you just don’t find in most city builders and was a large part of what kept it engaging for as long as it did.

Not every new thing in the mines was enjoyable, however. Certain floors contained hostile forces that would attack your mine workers and buildings if left unchecked. This is the Guard steambot type's main purpose; they fight the enemies and protect the bots. While exploration being met with an opposing force was interesting, the only thing left after was a reoccurring attack wave. I’m sure it was intended to give the Guards purpose after finding the key items and exploring everything, but it felt more like an inconvenient distraction than anything else.

All in all, Steamworld Build is a great addition to the series, providing a unique but refined take on the city builder genre. Anyone looking for a more complicated, hardcore experience might 🥂find it a touch underwhelming, at least until the game really starts to find its feet. Even so, its forgiving nature and slow but consistent feed of gameplay mechanics make it especially appealing to more casual players or folks new to the genre.

Score: 4/5. A copy of this game was provided for the purpose of this review.