Power to the People

Review

On the main menu screen, you’ll find Tutorials; there are three that you can go over to help you understand how the game works. The tutorials are Basic, Advanced and Expert.  The Basic tutorial goes over how to setup a simple power grid to a small city. The Advanced tutorial will teach you how to deal with problems when things go wrong, and the storage of energy which can be used later when power stations are down for regular maintenance or under repair. The Expert tutorial teaches you how power is distributed from your power stations to the city. The tutorials don’t take long and you’ll be guided by Bob, who was the last Power Architect before he was fired and now it’s your job.

To start a new game, you’ll have to select Start, you can then choose to decide what game mode you would like to play. You can either choose to Play the Main Campaign, Sandbox mode or there’s a Weekly Challenge. Campaign will have you visit various locations and scenarios around the world. Sandbox allows you to choose a location and set the settings for your game, available buildings, energy storage and power stations you can use. You can also customise the difficulty of the game with settings for starting funds, disaster frequency, city growth rate and power usage. Game mode and endless game are also options to help you customise your perfect game.

I chose to play the campaign.  Upon selecting campaign, you’re greeted with a globe of the world. At various locations around the world are shield icons which have either a padlock or a bolt of electricity. Those with a padlocks on them are locked and you’ll have to earn a number of Influence Points before they become available to play. You gain Influence Points from completing a location.  To begin with you only have one location ready for you to play, Siem Reap, just outside of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Clicking on the shield icon will give you some details on the current location, and will allow you to choose the game’s difficulty (Easy, Medium and Hard) along with perks and challenges. It also has a Leaderboard to upload your scores to and see others’ game scores, and you can select Game Mode (Strategic and High Energy, although High Energy is not available until you have completed the Strategic mode).

Upon the campaign starting you’ll receive a welcome explaining that you've been hired as the manager for the local electricity company in Siem Reap. However, you’re going to have to build the infrastructure not only for the growing city of Siem Reap but also for other cities which will pop up as time passes. Not only will you have to build everything and provide enough energy for a city’s needs, but you’re going to have to keep the population happy while you’re at it. If the satisfaction of the people falls below fifty percent, then that’s it, you’re on the rock & roll. You are required to survive fifty days in order to complete the level and move onto another location.  You are able to carry on after that time should you wish.

To begin with you don’t have access to all power stations in the game but you do have a few to choose from.  However, you’ll have to decide which is best suited to your current location, and make use of your environment. In Siem Reap, building hydroelectric dams can provide the power required to keep the lights on throughout the city and surrounding areas. Once you’ve decided which power station you want, you can place it on the map anywhere that is indicated in green. However, you don’t want to have any of the buildings near the city's inhabitants; doing so will have an effect on the people's satisfaction in you and you don’t want that happening.

After you have found a suitable place for your station, you’re going to need a substation to take the high voltage electricity produced at the power station and turn in to low voltage electricity which can then be supplied to the city folk. As with the power stations, there are different types of substations, each with a maximum output, efficiency and fixed costs per day. You’re going to have to find a suitable place to position your substation, as with all buildings. The city limits are indicated by white dash marks; however, these limits expand and grow, and they could start to infringe on your buildings, causing discomfort for the citizens. If this happens then it might be time to up sticks and move to another area away further from the city limits.

Now that you have your power station and substation you need to link them to the city. You do this by laying high voltages lines from the power station to the substation, then from the substation to your city via low voltage lines. Once you have everything connected you will see the flow of electricity along the power lines. Your power stations and substations have a bar which fills as more power is used. You must keep an eye on them as you don’t want them to overload and blow, causing the connected cities to lose electricity. This will upset the folks and they’ll let you know by a sad face icon throughout the city.  The power lines can also be overloaded and blow. Both buildings and power lines can be repaired but if you don‘t sort the problem, then it’ll keep happening.

At times, your power stations will require maintenance.  This will require the station to shut down for a number of hours. To help you in these times of need you can build Energy Storage which can be added to the high voltage power lines, and they’ll charge up with electricity and then when needed they will distribute the power to the city, hopefully keeping the people and their pitchforks at bay until the maintenance is over.

You can research new technologies which can be found on the Research Tree, where you’ll find research such as reinforced transformers, high efficiency transformers, staff training, improved cables, dynamic pricing and a whole bunch of others to help you provide a continuous stable supply of electricity. It takes a number of Research Points to unlock a new technology and you will gain one Research Point per day. A day finishes at midnight and upon a day ending you’ll be shown details of energy sold, customer satisfaction, income, profit etcetera. You can use a day's profit to improve, expand and provide power to new cities as they appear over time.

While you try to keep things running smooth there are also natural disasters to keep an eye out for. Trees falling on power lines, lightning strikes, cold weather and other disasters depending on your location.

In the settings there are options for Sound (Play Notification Sounds, UI Sounds, Sound Effect and Music Volume Sliders), Graphics (Screen Resolution, UI Scale), Camera Shake, Graphics Quality (Low, Medium and High), Antialiasing, V-Sync, VFX on Cables and Grid Overlay.

Gameplay: Language (English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Russian and Chinese), Units (Metric °C, M/S and Imperial °F, MPH), Time Format (12 or 24 Hour Clock), Autosave When Day Ends, Popup on Special Events, Mayors Provide Warnings. Controls:  Control Mode (Keyboard & Mouse and Gamepad), Camera Pan Speed, Edge Pan and Key Mapping.

I did find it quite challenging to begin with, but I started to get the hang of the game eventually. Sometimes it would show that there’s no power reaching parts of the city but upon checking, everything seemed just fine.

Other times I couldn’t get power to flow from my power station, substation or along my power lines. This was a little annoying as I kept building and tearing down what I had built, relaying power lines, but this emptied my bank balance faster than my ex on a shopping spree with my credit card. There has been an update which now allows you to regain money spent on buildings and power lines that day.

At the end of each day the game pauses, which is fine as it gives you time to prepare and build for the coming days.  But the message which tells you the game is paused in the top middle of the screen I found to be a little bit annoying as it got in the way when zooming in on the map. I had a look but unless I missed it, I didn’t find anywhere in the options where I could turn this off and would love the option to do so, as I don’t need to be reminded at the end of each day.

Despite the couple little problems, I’ve enjoyed playing Power to the People.  The graphics are good and it ran pretty smoothly. The developers are fixing bugs and they have just released a Free Play game mode in the Sandbox.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com

Power to the People Steam Store Page