Transport Tycoon has a very special place in my heart. It started back when I was a young lad, the game likely coming to me from my father who’d got it from some friends at work. I remember loving building little bus networks and trying to figure out just exactly how to make a business profitable. I was so proud when I made my first virtual million, ever so slowly creeping towards the goal as I finally began to understand the mechanics. Decades later I’d revisit it with my wife and house mate. All of us installing OpenTTD and having a blast competing with each other for hours on end. So when I saw Rise of Industry I was instantly intrigued, the gameplay giving me instant waves of nostalgia for those times. Whilst I can very much appreciate the mechanical depth that’s been built into this game there just wasn’t that something, that X factor, to keep me coming back after I’d grasped the base mechanics. It’s a shame really as I think that there’s probably a great game in there somewhere, it’s just not where I’m looking for it.
The premise is easy to understand: you’re a new business owner seeking to profit from the old fashioned game of supply and demand. You’ll choose a place to plonk down your headquarters which gives you the rights to build various gathering and production buildings in the region. The town has demands that you can meet, although you’ll want to pick your products carefully as not all of them will put you on the path to wealth. From there you’ll work through a tech tree to build even more elaborate products and infrastructure, allowing you to extract even more profit from your town. Over time you can expand your empire to other regions and you’ll have to set up transport routes between your different areas as there’s likely going to be things one place has that the other needs. As you’d expect this can all get pretty complex and whilst the tutorial does a good job of giving you the basics from there on out it’s up to you figure out how you and your company will profit.
Rise of Industry has the tried and true low poly look that’s very much in vogue these days. For the most part the developers have done a good job of keeping the visual confusion down with most buildings being recogniseable from a decent distance, saving you the trouble of hunting for that one factory you put in the middle of everything. Performance is also quite good, only really suffering when you fully zoom out and numerous other towns come into view. By default the UI is painfully small but thankfully there’s an option to increase the scale of it, making the game quite a lot easier on the eyes. The developers have also done a good job with the sound design, emulating a lot of other simulation style games. I’m not sure how to describe it, just that there seems to be a certain kind of soundscape that screams “You’re playing a simulation game!” which everyone uses. It seems the 2 or so years it has spent in various beta and Early Access forms has paid off.
Where TTD was focused just on the transportation of a few kinds of goods Rise of Industry takes it well into the next level with multiple different industry types all requiring their own specific set of resources. The staple is the Farmers Market which is mostly focused on items that can be built directly but the rest of them typically have requirements for products that you’ll need to manufacture. Of course that then means there’s usually inputs to those factories that you’ll have to gather first before you can start generating that item. From there you can start moving up different tiers of products which will likely require input of products from the previous tier. This then progresses up a further 2 more tiers, finally culminating in “prototype” products which win you the game once you sell one. There’s also a city levelling system built in, essentially allowing you to help the city expand and, by extension, get more shops for you to profit from. I believe there’s also trade built in here somewhere but I never got to the point where I needed to do that. Suffice to say there’s an absolute truckload of stuff to explore in Rise of Industry which is both a blessing and a curse.
Logistics will play a large part in your success and whilst the tutorial gives you the basics of how to run things it also sets you up for a micromanaging nightmare. Warehouses by default will gather everything produced in their radius, you don’t need to set up requests for them like the tutorial tells you to do. You can, however, direct places outside of their gather radius to send things to them, something which helps immensely if you didn’t plan your layout particularly well. You’ll probably need to make use of the manual routes quite often regardless as it seems that, even in an abundance of a particular resource (say water) some places will still not get their needs filled for whatever reason. Further on you’ll also have numerous routes going everywhere, something that’s easy enough to keep track of whilst you’re building them but becomes a tangled web of crazy once you’ve moved onto the next item you want to build.
There were two things that killed it for me: the feeling that every product is essentially the same and a lack of overall driving force to keep me playing. The first is easy enough to explain: basically every product you produce is basically the same in the end. Progressing through the tech trees really doesn’t reward you much more than giving you another building to look at. TTD at least gave you new vehicles, different kinds of transportation and a changing landscape with the passage of time. Rise of Industry by comparison feels pretty stagnant once you get everything set up and all you end up doing is counting down the time till the next research project completes. It’s much the same feeling I got after playing Stellaris for some time as the mechanical depth feels great initially but after a while it gets tedious as you simply wait until you can do the next cool thing.
The lack of meaningful competitors is probably what’s driving the latter as it’s blindly easy to build a profitable business, taking a lot of pressure away from you. Sure, your competitors pop up from time to time when an event or auction happens but they don’t ever seem to want to muscle in on your turf or say trash talk you when you’re trying to expand and losing cash like mad. The game itself does warn you about these things though, so the mechanism is in there for them to make the AIs something more than the one dimensional automatons that they are now. Without a meaningful adversary and little drive to want to achieve the next tier of products I ended up just getting bored each time I played, ultimately only ever making one save and even then I didn’t go back to it more than once.
Rise of Industry is a game I was so sure I’d like as it had everything that I’d want in a spiritual successor to one of my favourite childhood games. The aesthetics, mechanics and sound design were all done in a way that made buying it a no-brainer. However it just didn’t grab me in the way I expected it to, instead lacking that driving force that used to keep me glued to my seat for hours on end. To be sure I recognise that it’s a very well built game, one I’m sure many will find countless hours of enjoyment in, it’s just that it just didn’t hit the mark for this old reviewer. Perhaps if I’d been involved in it from its early days I might be singing a different tune but for me, today, Rise of Industry is something I’ll be leaving up on the shelf.
Rating: 7.5/10
Rise of Industry is available on PC right now for $42.95. Total play time was 4.5 hours with a total of 29% of the achievements unlocked.
