I don’t think I’ve seen a city-building game as original as “build a frontier boomtown populated only by retro-futuristic steam-powered robots” in a long time. So compared to the plethora of trend-following building games we’ve seen in recent years, SteamWorld Build is a refreshing sip of water in a pathless desert. And it stands out even more by doing it at the same time as building a city on it. Dig through the mines below for mineral resources and pieces of ancient technology that you can use to escape a dying planet. It’s a short and engaging city-building game that doesn’t offer much new besides the setting, but it uses existing elements to create an interesting whole, and I’ll definitely play it again in the future.

As has been the case for the last decade, SteamWorld games have a very established palette of character designs, colors, and even sounds to draw from. The result is a game world that is stylistically on par with much larger and more established series such as the Warcraft universe, and adapts very well to a variety of genres without losing its visual characteristics, personality, and setting. That’s still true in SteamWorld Build, where the goofily stylized robots are as charming as ever, with the same goofy voices set to the same rousing country guitar tracks. It’s a planet of steam-powered robots with Scandinavian accents pretending to be the Wild West, and by god they’re still here.

The core rules of SteamWorld Build aren’t new in city-building games. By providing services to your citizens and producing goods, you can eventually advance those citizens to higher levels, from settlers to engineers, from aristobots to scientists, unlocking new buildings that give even more to the next level of bots. If you want an in-depth simulation of each citizen’s needs, you won’t find anything comparable here, but its simplicity is a strength in its own right.

Fans of series like Anno will immediately understand what SteamWorld Build is about and will almost certainly enjoy it, as will people like me who remember the old Impressions City Building series. Services are routed to your metal reps via a simple distance system; everything moves along the roads you build, and any houses within range of a service building have instant access to them. Goods are produced at a certain rate, and while you can stock up on some of it, for the most part you’ll rely on having as much coming in as going out, and any excess you sell at your city’s stations.

But it’s not so easy, as your city is simultaneously expanding underground. Hire miners, prospectors and mechanics to mine, mine and improve your mining operations. At first you’ll focus on finding easily removable chunks of ore in the soil and rock, but later you’ll need to bring consumable tools like picks and drills to remove harder stone obstacles. And while the resources you find above initially support your mining operations, that will eventually change as your city needs the oil, water and ancient technology it unearths below. It’s a simple but fulfilling loop. Your city’s engineers will help you recruit mechanics to work underground. Then you’ll install and maintain automated mining machinery on the resource veins you find, and expand your tunnels further to allow you to expand more and faster both above and below.

At some point you’ll need security bots to keep your underground facility functioning and to protect it from giant bugs and ancient threats that may be unearthed. They actively protect your miners, but you can also build traps and turrets to deter enemies and defend your fixed base. It’s kind of Dungeon Keeper-lite, where threats are usually not a threat at all until you purposely unearth them, and you can approach fights at your own pace, at least at first. There’s also a wide range of difficulty levels, which can turn enemies from weaklings into real and consistent threats. This is a strong design choice for a modest city-building game like SteamWorld Build; destructive attacks can feel more annoying than challenging. The fact that enemies are used as speed bumps to smooth the pace of progression, rather than a gauntlet to constantly worry about, is nice.

While you are excavating and building, outsiders will also periodically visit your surface station. In classic Wild West fashion, this is a source of money and things you cannot make yourself otherwise – buildings of improvements. Most buildings have one or two free slots to upgrade, warehouses give you more storage space and workers to transport goods, resource producers get the chance to create bonus items, and even new pickaxes and weapons for your mining bots. You can also exchange surplus goods for cash, which is handy. These upgrades are very simple, and not complex enough to offer different building strategies with each new playthrough, but they do support your game experience in important ways – for example, if you’re not good at thinking up ideal production rates, you can just invest in bonus production and never have to think about your underperforming cactus sap farm again.

From start to finish, it took me just 8 hours to build a city, dig a mine, and build a rocket to escape SteamWorld. This is a quick and easy city-building title, which is both its greatest strength and what prevents it from being more appealing. There are five maps with different terrain to get around, but the decisions you have to make along the way don’t change much otherwise. You build the same thing each time with very little variation. Following the production chains and exploring these maps is a lot of fun, but it’s just fun, not a deep, exciting mystery that unfolds over time and draws you in deeper.

Choosing simplicity makes the game more beginner-friendly and accessible. This is evident, for example, from the fact that developer The Station has actually managed to provide proper controller support, as opposed to many other city-building games that are only partially successful.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any unpredictable elements or new things you can unlock and do the longer you play. Each map can be played on randomly generated underground levels, keeping the mining experience fresh. Completing a map unlocks permanent upgrades to the infrastructure of your futuristic city, such as an improved train station where deliveries arrive more frequently. Nothing special, but this is a kind of victory lap, freeing you from unnecessary routine tasks that are tiresome to repeat. It also saves you space, giving you more time to beautify your city with decorations. Nothing keeps your Steambot morale up like a well-placed railroad track.

Verdict

SteamWorld Build is a fun little city-building game. It doesn’t burden you with boring routine work or overwhelm you with bloated filler, but instead focuses on building a solid foundation by building your city and supplying it with supplies. The underground levels are a cool additional system that lets you expand, improve and defend your mining operation at the same relaxed pace as aboveground. At the same time, SteamWorld Build’s simplicity is a double-edged sword as there isn’t a lot of variety in replay value aside from the need to incorporate old pieces into new maps. This makes it a breezy city-builder worth playing over a few weekends, but not a particularly deep game that you’ll pick up again year after year.