I’ve been laying down cities since the first SimCity. The SNES version, I mean, so a few years late, but I got in deep. Since then, it’s been one of my comfort genres. So, I’m not sure where I stand with Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, which has just left Early Access into full release.
I’m not doing a review – at least not right now – because, despite having put around 20 hours into it, I haven’t come close to piercing its shell. I was thinking this as I was trying to set up plumbing in my burgeoning city and finding a new complication at every turn.
“It will all become clear with some experimentation and practice,” I told myself. Yeah, when? How many hours do I have to put in to learn this game, and will it be worth it?
At some point, I was trying to figure out how to prevent my trains from bumping into each other, but when I looked for help, the text box I found literally said, “Please find additional guides on the Steam Workshop or the internet about this topic. It is a very complicated topic.” That’s, uh, hm…
I don’t doubt that setting up a system of train semaphores (as I learned they’re called) to organize the traffic of your railways is complicated, but should it be? Yes, it should.
Because there’s someone out there who wants this level of depth. I wouldn’t mind learning the ins and outs of setting up a functional railway system. I just would expect it to be in a railway simulator. In Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, this is one singular component of a massive number of systems, each one with its own learning curve.
I need to make it clear right here: Workers & Resources has a number of different ways to tweak the experience. You can, for example, turn off power, water, or waste management. When creating a custom game, you can turn features on or off to tweak it to your liking. I hate having to set up my own difficulty because I never know where my skill level is at, and I’d prefer it when a developer has a default setting to tell me where my skill level should be at. The individual settings do have presets like easy, medium, hard, so it might be acceptable to start at easy and work your way up. That is, if you’re willing to make multiple cities.
However, even at easy, you need to set up train semaphores. And, even at easy, that is just one facet of a more complicated whole. Setting up a system where I could get coal from a mine to a processor to the train took me a whole lot of bulldozing. I’m not sure I ever got my public transportation functioning properly, because not enough people were using it to get to work. Or maybe I just didn’t have enough population, I’m not entirely sure.
Setting up a distribution chain was something else. I was doing it entirely wrong for a while. Then when I started doing it the way it told me to, it wasn’t working right. I then had to figure out how to adjust the minimum stock level at shops and bars, which was never explained anywhere.
Many times when I thought I was doing something correctly, I’d have to add something new to the pile and would find out I had set everything up in a way that felt optimal at the time, but turned out to be completely unworkable in the long run. It lets you work in the wrong direction unhindered. At some point, you may have to raze it all to the ground and build upon the ruins.
It’s hard to tell how much unintuitiveness is acceptable for the sake of complexity.
It can all be learned, of course. I didn’t know the relationship between residential, commercial, and industrial zoning until I played SimCity. But while that skill carried over to future city builders, I’m not sure train semaphores will. I’m not certain if the treacherously steep learning curve is going to be worth it.
I finished the first “campaign,” which acts as a tutorial. I moved onto the second, which is another tutorial but at a higher difficulty. It has a different focus that I find more enjoyable, but it also feels daunting. The added systems are sprawled out in front of you, and while you’re given the time and money needed to tackle them at your own pace, just the demonstration of how much left there is to learn is nearly disheartening.
On top of this, I have further reservations. It uses generative AI for some things. Mostly portraits of characters who give you instruction throughout the campaign. It’s not a pervasive thing, seemingly only shown in the tutorial campaign. However, that kind of makes it worse because it isn’t necessary and could have been done by an artist. The digital bodysnatchers don’t need to be here.
The UI is also not up to the task of managing all the complex systems. It tries. In particular, managing the routes of all the varieties of vehicles zooming around my brutalist cities can require digging through multiple windows just to find the one that will allow me to add and remove stops. I don’t even understand some of the displays, but I’m sure that would come with time.
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic has a very specific audience, and I’m pretty sure I fit in there somewhere. I just can’t be certain yet, because I haven’t found the bottom. I’m not sure if I’m going to find the bottom with the amount of time required to dig that far.
On the other hand, I made some far-out stuff in Kerbal Space Program, so I have an appetite to learn new things on some level.
That’s just my warning to you. If you felt that games like Cities: Skylines 2 went too far with abstraction when it came to their urban construction mechanics, then Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic has a lot to dig into. You just need to be aware that it is a tremendous leap from those games. This isn’t the next level of city builder, this is quite a few steps above that. You have to have the mind for it. You have to have the time for it.
