RISE OF INDUSTRY Preview on Steam Early Access

Rise of Industry is a strategy/micromanagement game by developer, Dapper Penguin Studios, and publisher, Kasedo Games. I would like to start this preview by stating that I don’t normally play these types of games (mainly because I’m not that good at them) so I apologize in advance if I missed/overlooked an important staple to this genre. Anyways, as the name suggests, this game is about creating your own industry and competing against other industries to be the most successful.

You gather the necessary resources to build products through farms, “gatherers,” and factories. Farms can be placed anywhere and generate either crops (wheat, cotton, sugar) or livestock (wool, eggs, milk, meat). Gatherers collect a resource such as sand, water, coal, copper, etc. Gatherers need to be placed near the resource they are gathering (for example, you can’t place a water gatherer in the middle of a desert, that makes no sense). Factories take 1 or more products and turn it/them into a new product. However, each factory can only be devoted to one product—for example, to build windows, you need to have 1 factory that turns sand and coal into glass and another factory that turns glass into windows.

At the start of a new game, you can only place some of the gatherers. You unlock everything else through the game’s tech tree. The first 3 unlocks are free, but then you need to spend in-game time researching everything else. The time it takes to research something depends on how much of your company’s budget you set aside for research (for example, the more you put into research, the less time it takes). When you finish research on a product, you also unlock the ability to make any buildings that are required to make that product—for example, if you research apples, you unlock the ability to build an orchard if you haven’t yet researched any other crop that can be grown from an orchard.

At every farm, gatherer, and factory, you can choose where to send what they create. Each town will have shops that will buy certain products—and something the tutorial doesn’t tell you (or if it did then I missed it) is that you can click on the name of a shop from the town menu and it will tell you what products that store will accept and how much it will pay you for each shipment you give the store.

Aside from research, you also need to pay upkeep on all of your buildings. One mistake I made very often was to make multiple buildings to produce a basic product. I was spending more on the upkeep of the involved buildings than I was getting for the product I was selling. Luckily, there is a button you can click on that tells you where all your finances are going each month—how much is being spent on total building upkeep, how much is being devoted to research, how much money your products are bringing in, and the net total for the month.

One minor thing I feel I should mention is that the game has buttons to pause and fast-forward time. The reason I’m mentioning this is because when you start a new game, time is paused. It took me a little while to figure this out and I researched a truck stop because I thought I needed it to produce trucks to deliver products—in truth, each building comes with 3 trucks to distribute its products, so the truck stop was unnecessary.

Even though I kept losing—the game appears to have the proper systems that are standard for the strategy/micromanagement genre with the promise of more systems being added (such as environmental pollution and PR campaigns). I would recommend this game to players who enjoy this genre.

Watch the RISE OF INDUSTRY E3 2018 Gameplay Trailer:

Related: E3 2018: RISE OF INDUSTRY Impressions