SteamWorld Build Review

I’m not sure I’ve seen a more original premise for a city builder than “grow a frontier boomtown populated entirely by retrofuturistic steam-powered robots” in a long time. That makes SteamWorld Build a refreshing drink of water in a trackless desert compared to the many, many trend-chasing builders we’ve seen over the last few years – and while you build a town above, it sets itself apart further by having you simultaneously excavate a mine below in search of both mineral resources and pieces of ancient technology that can be used to escape your dying planet. It’s a short, sweet city builder that doesn’t do too much new beyond that setup, but uses the parts it has to make a fun whole I know I’ll revisit in the future.

As has been the case for a decade, the SteamWorld games have a really well-established palette of character designs, colors, and even sounds to draw from. The result is a game world stylistically on par with much larger, more established franchises — like the Warcraft universe — that adapts really well to different genres without losing its visual distinction, personality, and setting. That’s still true in SteamWorld Build, where the goofily stylized robots that chug along to the same twangy country-western guitar tracks with the same silly voices are as charming as ever. It’s a planet of steam-powered robots that all have accents like a Scandinavian person pretending to be from the old west, and by God does it still work here.

SteamWorld Build’s central rules are nothing new in a city builder. You provide citizens with services and produce goods, both of which let you eventually upgrade those same citizens to higher tiers – Settlers to Engineers to Aristobots to Scientists – and unlock new buildings that offer even more stuff for that next tier of bots. If you’re looking for a deep simulation of each citizen’s needs, you won’t find anything like that here, but the simplicity is a strength in its own ways.

Fans of series like Anno will pretty quickly get what SteamWorld Build is doing and almost surely enjoy it, as will those like me who remember the older Impressions City Building series. Services are routed to your metallic folk through a basic system of distance: Everything moves over roads you’ll lay down, and any house in range of a service building immediately has access to it. Goods are produced at a specific rate, and you can stockpile some, but mostly you’ll rely on having just as much coming in as going out, trading excess away at your town’s train station.

But it’s not entirely cut and dry, as your town simultaneously spreads underground. You’ll recruit miners, prospectors, and mechanics to excavate, extract, and improve your mining works. At first you’ll focus on finding easily-removed chunks of ore in dirt and rock, but later you have to supply expendable tools like pickaxes and drills to remove harder stone obstructions. And while the resources you find above initially support the mine works, eventually that flip-flops as the town needs the oil, water, and old tech you excavate below. There’s a simple yet satisfying loop as engineers from the town help you recruit mechanics to work underneath it, who then install and maintain auto-extracting machines on resource veins you find, growing your tunnels further so you can expand more, and faster, both above and below.

You’ll eventually need security bots to keep the underground works functional and safe from whatever monstrous bugs and ancient threats you might dig up. They’ll help protect your miners proactively, but you can also build traps and turrets to scare off enemies and defend your static base. It’s a sort of Dungeon Keeper lite, where the threats generally aren’t threats at all until you dig them up on purpose, letting you take on fights at your own pace – at least, at first. That’s on top of a welcome range of difficulty settings that can make enemies anything from pushovers to a real, consistent threat. That’s a strong design decision for the kind of lowkey city builder SteamWorld Build is, where disruptive attacks could end up feeling more annoying than challenging. The fact that it uses enemies as speed bumps to smooth out the pace of progression instead of a constant gauntlet to worry about is nice.

As you dig and build, the train station aboveground also gets regular visits from out-of-towners. In classic old west fashion, this is a source of both money and things you can’t otherwise make yourself: Building upgrades. Most buildings have an open slot or two to boost them, such as warehouses getting more storage space and workers to haul goods, resource producers getting a chance to make bonus items, or even just new picks and guns for the bots in the mines. You can also trade away excess goods for cash, which is nice. These upgrades are very simple, not complex enough to provide diverse build strategies to each new run, but they support your experience in a key way: If you don’t enjoy figuring out ideal production rates, for example, you can just invest in bonus production and not think about your underperforming cactus juice farms ever again.

From start to finish, it only took me about eight hours to build a town, excavate the mines, and construct a rocket to escape SteamWorld. This is a quick and simple city builder, which is both its greatest strength and what holds it back from being so much more. There are five maps with different terrain to work around, but the decisions you have to make while doing so aren’t otherwise going to change very much. You’ll build the same stuff every time with little variation. Making your way through the production chain and exploring those maps is plenty of fun – but it’s just the one kind of fun, not a deep and engaging puzzle that unfolds and draws you deeper over time.

It does get a lot of beginner-friendliness and approachability from its decision to embrace simplicity. That’s evident, for example, in the fact that developer The Station has actually managed to deliver competent controller support, unlike a lot of other city builders that only vaguely succeed at it.

That’s not to say there aren’t any unpredictable elements or new things to unlock and do the longer you play, either. Each map can be played with a randomly generated underground layer, which is a nice touch that keeps the mine-building fresh. Beating a map also unlocks a permanent upgrade to future towns’ infrastructure, like a boosted train station that has shipments come more often. Nothing too special, but it is a bit of a victory lap that cuts down on busywork that’d be annoying to repeat. It’s also a space-saving convenience that frees up time to make your towns pretty with decorations. Nothing like a neatly-appointed rail line to keep up steambot morale.