Rise of Industry
A beautiful but aimless sandbox.
The first thing you’ll notice upon playing Rise of Industry is that it’s absolutely gorgeous. The boxy shapes and flat colours of the low-poly style are a perfect fit for the city/factory builder genre. This, combined with bright colours and sticker-like icons, makes the game looks less like a real city and more like a child’s play set. Unfortunately that’s also how the game plays, like a toy. Something that’s fun to play with, but lacks direction.
It’s fundamentally about supply and demand. There are a handful of towns of various sizes spread across the map, each of which has two to four stores which will buy a certain good. Your job is to fulfil that demand. This can be as simple as mining some coal and shipping it directly to the hardware store, or as complicated as the pizza, a puzzle of a product that requires mills producing flour, vegetable farms and a dairy producing cheese.
Eventually things get a little bit more complicated, with the player getting access to heavier trucks,
trains, boats and even zeppelins to haul products and set up long distance supply chains across the map. The only problem here is I didn’t feel enormous pressure to use them. You see, resources are spread so evenly across the map it seems just as easy to build a new manufacturing facility near your destination as it is to set up a railway line.
It also doesn’t help that the “campaign” is what I would usually consider a sandbox mode, while the actual “sandbox” is just the same thing but with infinite money and everything unlocked. There are AI competitors, but they don’t seem to add much beyond being a nuisance when they buy exclusive rights to build in an area I was targeting.
How much you’ll enjoy Rise of Industry is largely going to depend on how capable you are of making your own fun. The interactions are very strong, but the only goal the developers offer is creating an endgame product. There’s no real capacity for expression and creativity.