SteamWorld Build Review - A Bustling Town Built on Shaky Ground

Reviewed on: PC
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
Publisher: Thunderful Publishing
Developer: Thunderful Development
Rating: Everyone 10+

The most endearing aspect of the SteamWorld series is how each of its games relates to one another despite their disparate genres. From tower defense to turn-based RPG, each title offers a unique spin on a specific gameplay experience while adhering to a shared mythos, resulting in a fun collection of games that coalesce thematically. SteamWorld Build, Thunderful's city-builder/RTS hybrid, serves as the latest iteration of this formula. Sporting streamlined genre mechanics, intuitive controls, and charming visuals, many essential parts are in place. Unfortunately, despite a solid foundation, SteamWorld Build struggles to maintain an engaging experience throughout its campaign.

Like most of the SteamWorld series, Build doesn't directly connect to any of the previous games. Instead, it tries to provide a unique perspective on critical events that feed into the series' overarching narrative. This familiar setup works in parts. The plight of a group of travelers settling near an abandoned mine at the behest of a mysterious robot companion is initially attractive. Fans will especially enjoy the nods to past happenings and some extra lore surrounding an established planetary threat. That said, it won't take long for players to realize that SteamWorld Build's campaign is paper thin.

While the SteamWorld series isn't known for its character-driven stories, each new release offers more meaningful reasons to dive into its steampunk universe. SteamWorld Build's nearly nonexistent story is a step backward in this regard. There aren't any notable characters, worthwhile encounters, or imaginative events to speak of. Essentially, the why of it all doesn't matter, as the campaign's few cutscenes offer just enough exposition for it to be considered a means to an end.

Story woes aside, SteamWorld Build is entertaining. This is partially due to the streamlined approach to city-building and solid tutorial prompts. There are some genre staples, especially when it comes to building placement. You'll be told, for instance, to place Foresters (a giant tree-chopping machine) and lumber mills next to wooded areas to acquire logs. But most of the finer details involving the inner workings of a town/city – tax rates, zoning, population density in relation to the neighboring structures – are either handled automatically or simplified to a large degree.

 

There's no urban decay or adverse environmental issues to worry about. As long as your buildings are connected to their corresponding facilities and the central train station by road, they'll function as expected. And since the game's intuitive controls (whether using a gamepad or keyboard and mouse) do most of the heavy lifting, nearly every action can be carried out with just a few button presses. SteamWorld Build is more arcade than sim, offering a welcoming experience for newcomers.

Despite its simplified mechanics, SteamWorld Build appeals to genre vets thanks to its puzzling play. Instead of fixating on every minor detail linked to actual urban planning, the game emphasizes keeping your steambots happy by placing key structures. Your workers, who start economically at the bottom of the totem pole, are usually satiated by a general store and service shop. They don't need much to stay productive. Once you hit certain milestones, usually tied to the town's number of employable steambots, you can upgrade them into engineers. This next tier of citizens requires more service buildings and attractions to stay in good spirits. They also pay more in taxes.

Your main goal is to develop your town to the point where its citizens can mine specific relics (namely rocket parts) needed to escape a seemingly dying planet. This makes the continual growth of your town important as each tier of citizen is responsible for specific branches of productivity. This process can prove tricky as the requirements needed to satisfy them all are weighed against your town's overall needs. Creating too many workers means spending less money on new construction projects. Too few, and you won't have enough steambots to gather the basic materials (wood, coal, etc.) needed to keep the town functioning. The same goes for higher-tiered citizens; their larger financial contributions are offset by the cost of keeping them content. 

Learning to juggle these different factors is vital when playing SteamWorld Build early on. Some of it comes down to properly positioning certain services and attractions. Plopping a general store at the corner of an intersection makes it accessible to more workers. You can also use stat-boosting items, tradable resources, improved roads, and more. Your management duties double once you gain access to the mines. These underground areas feature RTS mechanics requiring a more hands-on approach. Instead of buildings, you place miner, prospector, mechanic, and guard quarters needed to spawn the corresponding steambots around the map. Aside from the guards and mechanics – who are there to protect and heal bots/build machines, respectively – these bots aren't autonomous. They must be assigned jobs like mining gold deposits, knocking down walls, placing turrets to repel pests, and building machines to harvest important materials.

Most of my time playing SteamWorld Build was spent hopping between my town's surface and subterranean areas. Watching the tiny steambots carry out their tasks as I slowly upgraded my residential areas was fun. I also enjoyed overseeing the developments underground; micromanaging these steambots offered a nice contrast to the above-ground activities. 

All of that changed during the game's last few hours due to a combination of competing systems. To collect the final component needed to leave the planet, I had to turn a few of my bots into scientists and make sure they were content for a set duration of time. The problem is that this directive has no wiggle room. When the other steambots weren't at 100 percent, and their collective numbers started to dwindle, the few that remained still pitched in. That wasn't the case here, as it was an all-or-nothing situation.

The other issue was that the scientist was the highest citizen level, meaning it takes a lot to keep them happy. Since my town had grown, it was easy for a given resource – water, food, etc. – to occasionally dip below a certain threshold. During those moments, my scientists became unhappy. I tried to mitigate some of this by improving all my roads, trading for the needed items, relocating attractions, buffing facilities, and so on. Nothing worked. The only thing I could do was wait for my steambots to produce enough of whatever was missing to meet my scientists' needs briefly.

Many sim-based games have this point where the player has seemingly optimized themselves into a corner. Their final objective is within reach, but because its strict parameters don't allow for alternative completion options, they can only wait as the game plays. That's what happens with SteamWorld Build. It's a shame, considering how enjoyable the core gameplay loop initially is. Things fare a little better once you've finished the campaign, though. Since each of the five maps offers rewards like free roads or faster miners upon completion, starting a new campaign with these unlocked bonuses is possible. You can also sidestep the story and focus on building the best town you can, which might be the ideal scenario.

SteamWorld Build is a unique hybrid that entertains for a time. Its early hours are fun, thanks to how well it uses simplified genre staples to create a more arcade-friendly gameplay loop, a sentiment bolstered by a solid tutorial and intuitive control scheme. Regrettably, SteamWorld Build's campaign overstays its welcome. The lackluster story and rigid final objectives turn what was initially an engaging experience into a tedious grind.

Score: 7

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The Talos Principle II Review – Profoundly Puzzling

Reviewed on: PC
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Developer: Croteam
Rating: Teen

The Talos Principle II often left me staring at my screen in awe. Sometimes, from sheer intimidation in the face of a seemingly formidable puzzle. Other times,  from my incredulous pride after unraveling said problem. But most of all, the experience regularly gave me pause as I pondered a philosophical idea or argument that challenged my viewpoints on the nature of existence and humanity’s place in the cosmos. These moments spurred me to solve the game’s 100+ puzzles in search of answers, and I’m largely satisfied with what I discovered. 

Set hundreds of years after its 2014 predecessor, The Talos Principle, you awaken in a utopian civilization as its 1000th – and final – sentient robot resident. Following mankind’s extinction due to a global virus centuries prior, intelligent machines designed by a brilliant scientist have inherited the Earth. As the sum of all human knowledge, these machines have resigned themselves to living within a single, modest city with strict population, exploration, and consumption limits to avoid repeating humanity’s mistakes. However, these beliefs are flipped on their heads when a mysterious entity taking the form of the Greek titan Prometheus beckons the machines towards a mysterious island with a pyramid-like megastructure, towers, and, of course, puzzles. You join a small expedition to discover the island’s origin and purpose. 

Despite the puzzles being the stars, I enjoyed The Talos Principle II’s focus on storytelling and character development, highlighted by choice-driven conversations that do a great job of emphasizing the machines’ inherited sense of humanity. I became invested in getting to know my crew, such as two close friends with opposing yet valid viewpoints on how society should advance or having more lighthearted chats with a resident unsure of whether or not to keep its surfer-style speech pattern. Decisions influence the city’s direction and your standing in ways you won’t see for hours, and while I found the outcomes to be adequately satisfying, some optional threads, such as choosing whether or not to join an Illuminati-style secret group, don’t always lead to an impactful payoff.

Regardless, The Talos Principle II presents many angles on important topics and leaves it up to its cast and players to decide what they believe. Fascinating philosophical concepts on the morality and responsibility of being an intelligent entity in a chaotic universe, numerous lore notes and audio logs, and even the city’s social media feed had me reconsidering my biases and beliefs in enriching and enlightening ways, even if I didn’t always agree. I’m still mulling over a log’s musings over humanity’s puzzling attitudes on natural extinction versus human-made extinction.  

I like that the game doesn’t prop any viewpoint as the “correct” one, and it doesn’t need to; the point is that you should ask such questions to see things from as many angles as possible, and players will draw their own conclusions to determine one of the story’s several endings. A plethora of dialogue choices does an admirable job of letting players express several potential perspectives, while the plot is an engaging and insightful mystery boasting neat twists and heavy revelations. 

Like the first game, placing crystal refractors to direct light beams around obstacles to the correct lock(s) to open the exit is the core puzzle-solving experience. New mechanics add exciting and creative layers while eliminating the annoying death-dealing hazards, such as bombs and turrets, from the last game. New tools include a device that creates portals on certain surfaces, an anti-gravity machine that lets players (and objects) stand on walls and ceilings, and a refractor that inverts light colors, among others. Each tool is a treat to work with alone, but the game soars highest when challenging you to use several in concert. 

Puzzle-solving is still a tricky exercise of placing, moving, and/or stacking objects in the correct spots or sequence, a process thankfully expedited by speedy player movement. Still, lengthier puzzles require a lot of running around to rearrange things, which sometimes wore on me. The final puzzle is the worst offender, as it requires a tedious amount of back-and-forth trekking to execute such a precise order of operations that slipping up often meant restarting the whole thing from scratch. Despite these headaches, I was consistently impressed with how developer Croteam managed to concoct so many well-thought-out puzzle rooms, and solving them never stopped feeling like a well-earned achievement. 

 

Unlike the last game, there’s no hint system, but you can skip puzzles entirely by spending a collectible resource. The catch is that finding these helpful tokens is a task in itself, as they’re hidden throughout the open areas. I don’t mind this as someone too stubborn to skip unless a puzzle is truly mind-boggling, and it gave me another excuse to explore, but it does create more work for those eager to move on and see the rest of the narrative. 

The biodiverse island is broken up into four cardinal regions composed of three smaller open hubs, each sporting eight primary puzzles plus optional riddles and collectibles. I enjoyed roaming these expansive regions between puzzles in search of smaller rewards such as lore notes, ancient human tech, or secret laboratories containing tantalizing secrets. The worlds also look quite nice despite frequent geometry pop-in. Though an overhead compass provides some guidance on how to find points of interest, the lack of a proper map made relocating some destinations more of a chore than I would have liked. Environmental puzzles, such as rerouting an island-wide light beam or chasing hidden particle clouds to statues, offer neat side diversions and welcomed breaks from the critical path. The other major recurring puzzle comes in the form of assembling bridges by correctly rotating and connecting giant Tetrinomo pieces, though this exercise lost its luster after a few hours. 

The Talos Principle II is a long game, perhaps to a fault. I clocked in around 34 hours, and despite my generally consistent enthusiasm, I was ready to see the end before it hit me with another round of puzzles or a story-focused exploration segment. It’s an ambitious and ultimately well-made package with many social, artistic, and scientific ideas that I’ll be thinking about for the foreseeable future, long after the solution to its final riddle has faded from memory. That enlightenment makes The Talos Principle II’s challenges worth the effort.

Score: 8.75

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Super Mario RPG Review - Toady Nostalgia

Reviewed on: Switch
Platform: Switch
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
Rating: Everyone

The original Super Mario RPG, released for Super Nintendo in 1996, felt like it was meant to be your first RPG. In an era when Final Fantasy tried its best to tell mature stories within the medium's limitations and Dragon Quest demanded hours and hours of your time, Mario’s adventure felt much brighter and more manageable. Familiar characters, a lighthearted story, a reasonable length, and timed button-pressing during combat made it stand out against the competition. Revisiting the game more than 25 years later in this new remade shape shows the original formula did not need much tweaking to deliver an engaging and enjoyable journey. Super Mario RPG is not entirely innocent of the sins of video games past, but old fans will relish the chance to see the game in a new light, and I’m confident newcomers will find something to love.

Beyond the fun combat, visuals, and story, the best part of Super Mario RPG is that it is incredibly bizarre. The Nintendo of 1996 was still figuring out the rules of Mario’s universe, and as a result, developer Square (not yet Square Enix) was able to create characters and put Mario in positions his parent company would likely never agree to today. The remake, thankfully, maintains all of that weirdness. I didn’t find anything salacious or offensive, but there are entire races of characters that we have never seen again in the Mario universe, Shy Guys have full conversations, and some dialogue choices make Mario come off as a jerk. In one scene, a party member has to hold Mario back from punching a child Toad who casually insulted him. I am grateful the game has not been sanitized and is still full of admittedly inconsequential references to other franchises and Nintendo games.

The story is also still quite funny. It never reaches the comedic heights of its spiritual successors like Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi, but I chuckled often. Mario’s primary means of communication is jumping to prove he is actually Mario, and every time I pressed the jump button to move the conversation forward; I appreciated the commitment to the bit. Outside of the comedic moments, the actual plot is perfunctory, with few, if any, emotional moments, but I was still eager to see where I was going and who I was going to meet next. Added in-engine character introduction moments and the occasional pre-rendered cutscene help deliver the story in new ways, but I am disappointed that the whole game doesn’t feature the same visual fidelity.

 

As it was in the past, combat is a highlight, and the additions for the remake improve the action without detracting from what made it fun to begin with. A new Action Gauge fills as you successfully pull off Action Commands (the timed button-pressing) across battles, and when full, you can pull off powerful and flashy Triple Moves. I went out of my way to try every party combination to see all of them and enjoyed tracking how high I could get my Action Command Chain across battles. One shortcoming, however, is pulling off Action Commands isn’t always clear beyond seeing your chain number ticked up. Subsequent games inspired by Mario RPG’s combat, like 2023’s Sea of Stars, have done a better job at iterating on this system and offering better feedback.

Much of what has changed about Super Mario RPG for the remake beyond the visuals is behind the scenes. The pace is brisker, and my hour count (even after beating the big optional boss) came in lower than the average playtime of the original. The game has been tweaked only slightly to add some new mechanics and make the adventure even more welcoming than it already was. The result is an experience that only shows its age slightly and rewards longtime fans and newcomers alike.

Score: 8.75

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