No, I do not recommend Rise of Industry 2 in its current state, there are plenty of bugs, and poor design decisions to hinder your enjoyment of the game.

I also find it hard to believe it will get better soon, as I did not see a clear roadmap during my time writing this, but I hope the devs, SomaSim, prove me wrong eventually.

Note: They are different devs from the first game of the franchise, which I did not play, so I will not make comparisons.

It is not common for me to start with the conclusion, and it is with heavy heart that I wrote it, as many devs put their labour and love on their projects that are not always successful. But there are many problems with the game in its current form, preventing anyone from endorsing it honestly.

The game had a problematic demo, so I found it strange that they went for a full release on such a short notice. There were many bugs identified in the demo that were not fixed. I expected another beta, or at least releasing it in Early Access instead.

It is hard to have a regular review when the game is this broken. My experience resembled as of quality assurance, as my notes for this game are a list of bugs and poor design decisions, with the many items that can break your game.

I will still go through the “essence” of the game, but in addition, I will go through my review process and some points of improvement that could have mitigated many issues of the game.

Production Management as a concept

A long, long time ago, I played this browser MMO where you acquired companies and managed their production. Sadly, I don’t remember its name. The core gameplay was to buy base materials and sell the output of your companies in the market with other players that resembled a stock exchange (If you know what I am talking about, please share the name of the game).

I remember being very fond of hydroelectric companies back in my childhood, as they were fun to visit and humongous. So I made my portfolio around selling energy to other players.

It was an HTML page with a database that would update every game tick, it did the transactions needed by the players at that moment and updated the database with the new information. You would tweak your production and prices until you find something that works for you.

This low-resource info update method is something that I wish I could say Rise of Industry 2 did right, as it was my first impression.

In the game, adding graphically a mining building on the map, is not different than pushing a button on the browser game that will make it appear +8 minerals at the game tick, in this case, once a day.

CPUs are very good at doing simple functions like that, so I was surprised when the game started stuttering more and more as my company grows.

In Rise of Industry 2 you build industrial complexes to satisfy your shareholder needs, producing and selling the created products to make more money, so you can build new structures to satisfy other shareholders, rinse and repeat.

When you build a mineral extraction mine, it means adding a number to that mineral value at the end of each day. Connecting roads means that you can move something around, adding delivery routes would move that mineral to a factory, so on and so forth.

The art assets are simply repeating on a loop, the visuals on the map are just representing a spreadsheet: how much resource you get each turn (farms, mines, manufacture), if you can store them (warehouses, dump) and if you can move things from one place to another (garages, roads, utilities).

That means you don’t need to follow the little trucks animated on the road to confirm a delivery, as they are just for show.

In a perfect world it should all run smoothly, the game Lemmings proved that you can have multiples of the same assets on a screen more than 30 years ago without destroying your computer. And doing a simple map behind the scenes should not be that resource hogger.

Sadly, over time, bugs accumulate, visual artifacts appear, and as your industrial complex grows, the game starts stuttering, what makes me think there are a lot more problems under the hood to be fixed.

Another point I wish I could talk positively about was the added complexity as you progress in the game. While in the first scenarios your industry production is steady with mines and factories, farming adds production seasonality, and there are random events affecting your production or clients needs.

But they are poorly described, difficult to understand and there was no correlation with the consequences. I had a series of random events asking for money or science points for preventative measures, from training personnel to maintenance of factories to environment protection, followed by having to close my factory because something preventable broke.

I also had a mine which description claimed it would give 8 minerals per day, instead the mine was generating 10. I was eager to learn how to improve the output. There was an info button there that said production bonus: None. Was it a bug? Was any info missing? I don’t know.

That happened for everything, be it adding a manager to a complex, or delivering fertilizers to a farm. What are the effects? How can I confirm it? It is Summer now, when does it end? Does it happen at the same date for every year? For every map, be it in Florida or Colorado (all maps are in the USA)? If I build a farm on a high production zone, what does it mean? People are going to work faster, or it affects only the plant growth? Why do I see 8 in the mine blueprint, but when constructed it shows 10?

Many important things to help you take decisions related to your production are poorly described, if there is any description, or it is hidden somewhere else.

Decisions and available information

For many decisions you take in this game, you might want to check the information in a few different places, which is common for this genre. The problem is that they make it impossible to open all the panels you need at the same time. Some panels are deep in an unrelated set of options. For example, there is a production table that is under contract.

Most information you cannot keep on the screen if you need to access another: you need to close a series of menus, then open another series of menus. I started taking notes - nothing wrong with that, I used to do it all the time with old games - and ended putting info in a spreadsheet (Calc) when my business became more and more complex.

I would have loved to be able to just dump everything of the game in a spreadsheet. Instead, I lost the count of the number of times I had to pause the game, go around this nightmare of menus collecting data, so I could figure out how many corn farms have to be built to satisfy this new investor.

And this is just the decisions on the information that is available to you, not counting the things that are missing because of bugs or intentional(?) design decisions.

Another issue that bothered me was the weird numbers associated with production and contracts. For example, with contracts you would have a client that would ask for 17 products to be delivered every 7 days, another would want another odd amount every 13 days. But for everything else you have numbers are based on integer units per day.

You can make it work, even if it is weird a client asking you for 0.33333333 cars per day. They might be paying a premium for their accounting firm when their fiscal year is a prime number.

In the end, when the numbers were so unreliable, like with farms, once I satisfied the stakeholder, I would just disable them and buy a constant stream from suppliers.

Interactivity

This game could have been a spreadsheet and I would have loved it. Click this button to add an aluminum factory, click that other button to buy raw resources from a supplier.

There are two design decisions with Rise of Industry 2 that fail to match with each other and the numbers game: “Real-time” and the “industry complex building”.

I do like building tools in game, it gives you some freedom for creation and personalizing things to your taste for that feel of ownership. They can be aesthetics and optional, like designing the visuals of your car in the game Detroit, or functional, like the doctor’s office in Theme Hospital.

But Rise of Industry 2 fails in both aspects for me. First, you have to create an industry complex so often, that it loses the charm of a new car release. Second, there is an intentionality on how you build your hospital. It is important where you put your rooms, reception desks, and many others, so you can process the patients timely and make sure your staff is up to the tasks, none of that happens here.

With the Rise of Industry 2, the way you position things has little effect on the outcome. And as long as they are connected, the workers will always work, the deliveries will always deliver and the production will always produce on the turn of the day.

I say most of the time because some buildings, like mining, need to be placed on top of the resource source, and, with some organization, you can place multiple mines on the top of the same resource.

Moreover, the building tool is not friendly either and makes everything harder and laborious. You must set things in a specific order, always starting with the main building of a given complex, and once you set the building blueprint, you can only delete, you cannot move things around.

I tried to size a property to figure out how many factories would fit in a lot, by setting the blueprints around. If you realize you can fit one more building by moving everything one square to the left, you will need to delete everything and start from scratch.

There is no pleasure in building, and it gets worse when you progress in the game, as you might need to do the same thing again and again. If you take Two Point Hospital, for example, it is easy to build medical rooms, copy and paste blueprints, save the template for a future scenario, and edit as you need.

The real-time does not help it either. As far as I am aware, nothing in the game changes in the course of a minute, everything seems to happen on the tick of the day, and important things happen on an even larger scale. You might get hit by a random event popup and that is it. Usually, you are either on fast-forward mode until you have enough money to build something, or paused so you can build something.

When you play real-time resource managers, like the Theme or Tycoon franchises, or even the recent reviewed Timberborn, there are things happening in real-time. You see the customers roaming around in your Theme Park, providing feedback like they had to walk too far to find a toilet, and you can act on those things. Even if you fast-forward, there are still things happening in real time that can provide you with insights to your next decision.

In its current state, Rise of Industry 2 would benefit more from a turn-based, similar to Football Manager, where you define your week, month or whatever, and then you pass the turn.

The importance of having a proper bug list and roadmap.

We usually get press keys one to two weeks before the game release, we also get a deadline and/or end of embargo date.

I test them, take notes of good things, bad things, things I learn. If I have problems, I try to figure out if it was with me or with the game. If I find bugs, I try to reproduce and report.

Frequently, I have issues with pre-releases, making it difficult to enjoy a game. I reach the devs when possible, most of them uses some way to track bugs, either from inside the game, or something outside, often websites or CRMs like Zendesk. I also created an account on both Twitch and Discord just to reach them (otherwise I would not use those services).

I could not find a bug tracker, and the areas of access were too public to discuss a non-public pre-release. But I found out that they were working on some bugs, and that it would be patched on release day.

I was expected to delivery my first draft for internal review a few days before the game release. We discussed at Boiling Steam to wait for this patch since we had some spare room for the review due date.

Because of the state of the game, I was expecting an Early Access release. And while I was not expecting the game to be fully fixed, it felt like the patch made it worse. Within a couple of minutes of gameplay I crashed the game badly while I was trying to destroy some buildings. My plan was to test the bugs I had before, but now I had so many more problems.

One of my initial issues was to make a manager disappear, so I tried to replicate it. But as soon as I hired my first manager, the hiring screen would not go away, so I could keep hiring them again and again until I pressed reject. What made things even weirder is that I hired the person for one position, and the hiring popup described another position. It was a bug on top of a bug.

It was also weird they released the game in full. The game should have been released as Earlier Access some time ago. It would be more manageable with a smaller scope, and testing and adding new features over time with proper feedback. There are many things that just don’t work that could be identified earlier, and maybe the time could be spent on something better.

After release, they added a bug tracking feature on their Discord. With the size of the scope and what was done so far, I imagine it will take 2 to 4 years to fix and improve the game.

It is also hard to expect much from a company when there is no clear roadmap, this is not just related to games but the industry in general. Paraphrasing something I had to tell a representative from a German supplier that did not have a roadmap:

We don’t need the secrets of your company, we need to know you will be around next year.

Last remarks

I was crunching numbers because it is something I love, but there was very little reason to do that. I appreciate the details were there, how much this cost, how much that produces, how many workers I have and how much I pay them.

But most of the game was around building, skip time to get money, build more, make more money. I could entirely ignore the numbers I like and be successful anyway.

I really wanted to like this game, in essence it was supposed to be the kind of game I would enjoy.

I even prepared a few anecdotes about things I learned from playing the game, but in short:

• Urban sprawl is bad for industry - (endless single small houses suburbs takes valuable land that could be used for production)
• The majority of managers are terrible because it is not worth to keep looking for better ones - it is also boring.
• If you need money, just fast-forward life.

There are also funny corporate-style videos with VHS artifacts, introducing each of the campaign maps and related resources you would be working on.

But, even with the bugs fixed, it is hard to recommend the game because of the design choices.

I would have enjoyed it more if they released something with a smaller scope as Early Access and built it from there with the help of community feedback and result of sales.

Rise of Industry 2 is available on Steam.

Note: We received a review key from the publisher.