Review: SteamWorld Build Doesn’t Dig Deep Enough

SteamWorld Build is the latest in a series of charming, bot-focused games that run the gamut from mining platformers to turn-based RPGs. This time around, Swedish developer The Station retooled the setting into a city-builder along the lines of Anno or perhaps The Settlers, with the twist being that you also control the mine excavation business underneath the town..

The setup follows homesteader Jack Clutchsprocket and his daughter Astrid, steam-powered robots on a mission to found a mining town in the desert at the behest of a suspicious machine of unknown origin. The machine explains that the planet is unstable, and they must delve deep into the earth to uncover lost technology before they can escape to the stars. But to support all that, they’re going to need to found, then expand, their little frontier town. It takes a village to escape a dying planet, after all.

From there, it’s your usual city-building fare. You put down houses connected by roads to amenities to keep residents happy. You then build industries to gather the natural resources of the area and processors to turn them into more advanced goods that will, in turn, let you support more advanced workers and larger economies. It’s simple and perhaps a little uninspiring on its own, but it’s clean, competent, and looks very pretty.

The trademark SteamWorld charm is on full display here. Houses and workers have that ramshackle look so typical of the series, while the more industrial buildings include absurd, cartoonish contraptions like over-sized woodcutting axes or giant cactus presses for extracting water. Some of the characters, especially Astrid and Jack, can come off a little bit twee, but it’s tolerable and plays a good foil to the ancient machine who can’t quite contain his contemptuous superiority over the less advanced bots.

Once you’re set up, it’s time to start delving deeply and greedily. Repairing the mineshaft allows you to access the underworld. It’s then that the game switches to more of a Dungeon Keeper style of play. You mark rock for mining, and your minions scramble to obey, exploiting deposits for minerals that can be sent topside for processing, before being used to add more quarters and tools for different types of miners. Having to develop these two sides in tandem is a fun twist and goes some way to making up for some of the lack of challenge in each half on its own. However, it still rarely manages to provide any interesting strategic problems beyond “place Y building to solve X problem.”

As you descend down the mine tiers, you’ll find new resources, treasures, ancient rocket parts to assemble, and eventually stumble upon subterranean enemies. I had hoped the introduction of an active threat might shake things up a bit, requiring some crafty room and trap placement á la Evil Genius, but it was not to be. The nasty critters only really attack when you decide to breach the area they’re locked in, and even a handful of Guards can handle most of them. Especially if you can scrounge up some firearms. Even if you do happen to dig into a wave-spawning hive, there are not many options offered or needed to deal with them. Just put some turrets and have a guard house nearby, and that’s the extent of the defensive preparations.

There are a few other rusty patches in the otherwise quite clean clock-workings, too. For one, getting new citizens of a particular tier requires upgrading fully satisfied houses from the previous tier. The upgrade itself is satisfying, and being able to move things around for free means you can then move your new engineers or aristobots into their own area. But, having to do that for each new house in a tier, then having to repeat it for each previous tier to top up your workforce, becomes tedious busy work very quickly.

While the ability to move buildings for free should make rearranging your layouts for optimization or incorporating new buildings, you rarely need to for anything other than residential areas. You don’t get much in the way of real upgrades that change the way you want to design your city. No big logistics hubs to plan around like you might get in Cities: Skylines for example, just better roads that extend how far amenities stretch and a few items you can equip to individual buildings to boost production.

There’s also just this feeling of detachment from your settlement, not to mention your citizens. When playing something like Cities: Skylines for example (I know, a very different style of city-builder, but bear with me), you’re compelled to make a big sprawling city with a choice of how to fulfill all your power and transport needs, then ways to optimize them. But SteamWorld Build feels like it lacks that sense of choice or personalization or of making a home, perhaps not helped by the narrative framing of just building a town to get stuff so you can leave again. It’s especially odd, because the whole aesthetic is so incredibly idiosyncratic, so individual in the way all the bots and buildings are built of mismatched industrial parts. The world feels lived in and warm, cozy even, but the gameplay fails to capture that feeling.

It’s a shame, because SteamWorld Build has such a solid foundation, but it ends up not feeling that compelling to play. I’m usually the type to spend hours in any kind of base-building game trying to make a perfect, aesthetically pleasing layout, but this is one of the few games where I haven’t felt that urge past the first few hours. That said, there’s still a lot to love from the designs to the concept, so if you like the SteamWorld setting at all it’s likely worth checking out on Game Pass.

SteamWorld Build will launch on December 1, 2023, for PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Series X/S. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass.