SteamWorld Build (2023) [PC] review

“…they left tracks in history that will never be eroded by wind or rain – never plowed under by tractors, never buried in compost of events.”

–How The West Was Won

The SteamWorld game series has been one of my favorites ever since I played SteamWorld Dig on the Nintendo 3DS. Since then, there have been several releases spanning many different genres. The latest, SteamWorld Build, is the first to give us a city-builder and resource management sim where you must grow and manage a mining town. 

You take control of Jack Clutchsprocket who is guided by a machine simply referred to as the Core. Jack leads his fellow bots into an abandoned mine so that they may reopen it and build a town from the ground up. Their ultimate goal is to dig underground and find six rocket ship parts so that they can escape the dying planet. For those who are longtime fans of the franchise, the story takes place roughly around the same time as SteamWorld Dig 2. I enjoy how all the games in the series find ways to connect and be relevant to each other despite having completely different settings and premises. 

SteamWorld Build starts you off on the surface where there’s only a train station and a broken entrance to the mine. Your first task will be to build workers’ quarters and place them along a road. Workers have needs so you’ll require build a market and repair shop for them. For materials, you must build a variety of buildings such as a deforester near a wooded area and a lumber mill, plus a warehouse to hold all materials. All must be connected by road and all buildings must be connected to the train station.

This is a unique take for a city-builder. Every facility has a range where it can reach residences via road. If you build workers’ quarters too far then they will need their own market, service shop, etc. Having limited real estate made this quite the challenge as I had to really plan out where to strategically place buildings, roads, and resource manufacturers in relation to each other. It’s a bit nerve-racking when you see a lot of angry citizen icons above several houses when their needs aren’t met. Luckily, the game makes it easy to plan layouts: hover your cursor over each facility and the roads will highlight blue indicating how far each resource will travel which will let you know what buildings it will affect. The game also lets you easily move buildings whenever without consequence which I appreciated. 

Eventually, you’ll need to expand even more and the worker’s quarters will need to be upgraded to engineer’s quarters which will have increasingly more complex needs. The city will have everything from saloons, burger joints, and bot washes. Of course, some facilities need even more resources such as the burger place needing a cattle farm. Just don’t ask me why robots need to raise machine cows in order to process robot steak. The game is oozing with SteamWorld charm and I appreciated all the funny little details that make you wonder how they would even process a robot burger. I also found myself taking a short break and zooming into the busy streets to see all the little robots go about their business.

With as much time as you spend town-building, this is only half of what the SteamWorld Build offers. The second half is spent underground after you repair the mine entrance where you will begin your digging endeavors. The underground segment works differently since you don’t need to worry about roads. The first thing you’ll do is build miner quarters. The more you build, the more miners you have at your disposal. Using the mine tool you can select which blocks to excavate, as long as the rock type is breakable, and the miners will go off with their pickaxes. The mines themselves will be unstable as indicated by falling rubble and if you don’t build enough supports as you dig you risk cave-ins. 

Once you have cleared out enough space in the mines, you’ll have room to build prospector quarters, which are needed for mining specific resources. Also, building engineer quarters will make it possible to use mining tools and repair machines. Gathering certain resources from the mines will yield new materials that will make it possible to build new structures on the surface. In a cycle of constant expansion, you’ll be jumping back and forth between the mines and town depending on what your current needs are. Expanding in one area will open up new possibilities in the other.

Eventually, you’ll find the first rocket part in the mines. Shortly after you’ll gain access to a deeper level in the mines. From here, you’ll have to start from scratch building new miner quarters as none of the resources from the first mine carry over. However, you will be able to find new resources not found in the previous level. You won’t have much reason to go back to the first mine unless you find yourself in need of more resources only found on that level. I would recommend staying on one level and expanding more than you’d think you need to before going off to explore the next area. That way you won’t have to worry about resources.

I found it really interesting playing a city-builder where you need to manage several maps simultaneously. As you find more rocket parts, yet another underground level becomes available. It starts off so simple but gets more and more complex as you progress. Eventually you’ll even need to build an armory and set up defenses when miners encounter monsters in the deeper dungeons, all the while the town on the surface is expanding with even more residential types in need of new buildings and resources. You’ll also come across items that can be equipped on certain buildings or workers’ quarters that can provide a much-needed boost.

It can get a bit overwhelming having to manage an ever-increasing number of resources. Luckily, SteamWorld Build provides an awesome feature that will help keep things manageable: the train station. Accessible right from the start, a train arrives at the station every five minutes and you have the option to set up trades. Let’s say your town is producing too much wood but not enough spare parts, you can create a trade that will automatically trade an amount of wood for spare parts. This trade will continue to happen every five minutes until you change or delete it. I found this very useful and ended up creating several trades for the resources I wasn’t doing great on. 

As you progress through milestones, cutscenes will trigger to progress the story. Many mysteries await with Jack’s daughter receiving strange transmissions and the Core possibly not having the robots’ best interest in mind. The story is completely optional and you can turn it off when you choose a map in the beginning. Speaking of which, there are several biomes you can select with either a set or randomized layout. The story will be the same regardless of which one you choose, though. You can also set different difficulties, including a sandbox mode where you won’t ever have to worry about resources and can build to your heart’s content.

It has been a busy month for me so I did not get a chance to complete the story and experience all the mechanics there are to see, but I greatly enjoyed my time with the game and it’s one I could easily lose many more hours in. If you’re a fan of city sim then you will be in for a treat, the setting offers a unique take on the genre and its fairly fast pace will keep things interesting through each milestone. If you’re not a fan of city sim but are a SteamWorld enthusiast, perhaps the quirky world of SteamWorld Build will be enough to entice you to give it a shot, anyway, which I encourage you to do.

Thank you to Thunderful Games and The Station for providing a code for this review.

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