
It’s a setup that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s played Anno, Industry Giant and Factorio. Construct agricultural and industrial estates of factories, farms and logistics buildings. Research and build products in order that you can research and build new products. Then, most importantly, transport those products to satisfy demand in increasingly efficient and profitable ways.

Rise of Industry is a steady experience. It takes time to build up your empire and the products you can create. Settlements evolve into larger towns and cities, but this too is a gradual process. Research takes a while and you can only do one at once (but you can spend time, err, researching research so that you can research future research faster). This leisurely approach is no bad thing, and you can choose to fast-forward time in increments up to 10x if you’re feeling impatient.

Region auctions, in particular, can feel like a frantic land-grab between you and the AI, because a region can only be owned by one company. Miss out on certain ones and their resources may never be available to you except through wholesalers – at a significant cost. You’ll likely never have the perfect game, the most efficient transport network or a complete monopoly over all resources and products. Rise of Industry is all about getting as big of a share of the pie as you can in your bid for prosperity.

What helps make Rise of Industry a pleasant experience despite all the number-crunching and cutthroat business tactics is its lovely presentation. The world is rendered in colourful, slightly abstract polygons which err on the side of minimalism while still allowing for plenty of little details. It has a quaint vibe, as if playing with a model town, and feels reminiscent of SimCity 2013.

It does also lack some quality of life features compared to its peers. There’s a traffic heatmap, for instance, but not a pollution heatmap. Settlements tell you in vague terms that they’re ‘growing’ or ‘stagnating’ and give a population figure, but you can’t really tell when they’re going to upgrade to the next settlement type. This is an important event that requires your input and provides a new, higher-tier store for you to supply products to.

And then there’s logistics. Warehouses are placed in the centre of your facilities, with an area of effect. They’re supposed to automate distribution, which they do, but this doesn’t always make your life easier. Whereas they do a good job of taking in resources and sharing them out to the factories that need them, by default they horde goods you want to sell, so a level of manual fiddling is then required on top to get your products to where they need to be. Creating intricate trade routes is also, perhaps understandably, quite tricky to get your head around.

If you are planning on picking it up, make sure you read our Rise of Industry guide for loads of handy tips and tricks for getting started!
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