Reviews - Th13f

Some people are comparing Workers & Resources with games like Transport Fever and Cities Skylines. This can't be further from the truth.

While the game has some superficial similarities with the above-mentioned titles, in the sense that you can build cities and services, along with transportation infrastructure, but that is where the similarities end.

To call this game a mere "business management simulator" or a "city builder" would be a massive understatement of what it truly is. Don't be fooled by the somewhat rough appearance, or the superficial comparisons. What this game truly is, is a "country simulator".

The game places you in control of a fictional, unnamed communist country in Eastern Europe. Your task is to build your country up from an impoverished 3rd world state, into an economic powerhouse and develop it into a communist utopia, though how you achieve this is up to you, as Workers and Resources allows you an impressive amount of flexibility.

The sheer complexity of the game's mechanics is breathtaking. Workers and Resources has, hands down, the most complex economy system I have ever seen in a videogame, by a comfortably wide margin.

As the name suggests, in this game, you manage your country's (that's right, country, you build multiple cities on the same, fairly large map) resources and population in order to develop highly complex production and logistics chains which power your entire economy.

Everything from power & fuel production and their distribution, to housing, electronics and heavy industry and, of course, the infrastructure required to transport the workers to their job sites and satisfy their needs, is a highly complex system, yet it will feel intuitive to veterans of the city-building genre and it all comes together beautifully to form an intricate and well-oiled economy, aside from some unpolished interface elements which are, quite frankly, minor issues that can be overlooked.

There is no "designate industrial and residential area" system, where you draw some vague outlines on the screen and the AI will automatically build mere graphical representations of factories and utilities. This game is no Cities Skylines. What this game offers you, is total and complete control over every single aspect of your fictional country's economy. Every industry needs to be built by hand and the infrastructure must be constructed in order to feed it raw materials and output its products into other factories down the production chain.

The game does this beautifully and allows you a remarkable degree of control over how much of X is produced, how, where and in what amount it is distributed, allowing you to optimize your production chains and personalize them to your liking, up to and including the various exports and imports into and from both the western market and the eastern block (yes, this game has two currencies that coexist).

Many people have dreamed of such a game, yet many have said that something this complex would be impossible. I'm glad to say that 3Division, the makers of this wonderful game, proved the naysayers wrong. Yes, it is still in early access, but it is not the usual bare bones early access game that hardly has any content. Let me put it this way, Workers & Resources, in its early access stage, has more content than SimCity 2013 had at launch. A lot more.

And despite a few crashes here and there and the occasional bug, spelling mistake, or translation error, Workers & Resources will run remarkably smooth and stable and it is surprisingly well balanced.

Do I recommend this game? Yes! A hundred times yes. It is well worth the $25 it costs and will give you countless hours of enjoyment. It is one of those games that makes time fly and will keep you glued to the screen for hours at a time.

This is Warlords Battlecry 4. We can hide behind the finger all day long and call this a mod, but this doesn't change the fact that this is the WBC3 sequel we've been looking for all along. I recommend this for any WBC fan, as well as any other RTS players, as there's nothing out there quite like it. For long-time fans of the series, it adds a ton of new features and expands upon the already complex gameplay of the previous entries of the series. This is still in development, however it has impressed me enough to give it a 10/10 rating. Enlight should endorse this as the official sequel, as it deserves to be included on the list of official WBC titles.