Rise of Industry

Review

Here you are with several million dollars at your disposal and the entire business horizon in the palm of your hand. The question is, in which industry are you going to invest this small fortune first? Would it be in farms, construction resources, mines or in clothing? You might be bold and decide to have your fingers in several pies. But here lies a small issue, as other entrepreneurs have their eyes firmly set in the same regions you are interested in. There is a name for this, and I believe it is called market competition. Well, it is time to show everybody who is boss in Rise of Industry.  

Rise of Industry is a strategy / simulation management game developed by Dapper Penguin Studios and published by Kasedo Games. The game is available since the 9th of May, 2019 on the Steam platform with many positive reviews under its belt.



Before starting a game, I strongly recommend going through the tutorial (it’s not too long) which will give you the fundamentals of the game. From here, you’ll be able to do a few things: you can play either a career, a scenario with your own challenges, or in a sandbox mode (money is not an issue).

After selecting the career mode, you’ll be prompted to choose the map size, how many other entrepreneurs will contest the map with you, how many rivers the map will have, and other difficulty points such as traffic congestion, pollution and a few others to increase or decrease the gameplay difficulty.

A typical medium map will have seven regions and each of them will have a town in it. Your first task is to choose in which of these regions your headquarters will be located. Make sure to click on seven town centres to find out how big is the town but most importantly what resources can be found within it. Then when you are happy with your choice, place your headquarters close by. That will allow you to raise buildings within that region straight away. You’ll be able to build in other regions, but you’ll need to buy a licence per region to be able to do so. On top of that, the other entrepreneurs can bid against you, which will increase the licence each time someone bids. They can become seriously expensive in some places, let me tell you, especially if you set the difficulty quite high. Also, bear in mind that you have between 10 to 20 million dollars in cash when you start the game. So be wise and start one or two industries and start servicing these towns with goods.

Each of the towns will have two stores in the early part of the game: the marketplace and the hardware store. More stores will appear as each town grows; as a matter of fact, you’ll be choosing the next store in town if you help them by providing specific goods for their growth. If you don’t have the goods in hand, you’ll be able to give them cash instead, but again, it can be seriously expensive.

You’ll also be given three free technologies to choose from on top of the water pump, coal mine, fish harvesting, wood, Iron, dirt road and copper. The technology three is divided into five types of industries (rural, light and heavy industries, prototype and auxiliary or transport etc) and each of them has specifics sub industries. For the rural, you’ll have wheat fields, livestock farms etc. Each of them will have four levels of technology to purchase. That’s right, it will cost you money and time to find each of these technologies. To give you an idea the first level might cost you 200k and 60 days to acquire while a technology on the forth level will cost millions and take nearly two years to obtain.

Then it will be all up to you to develop these industries, create products that can be sent to manufacturing plants to create new articles and find out in which town to send them to maximise your profits. Save money and buy a licence and develop the new region and so on and so forth.

As you go along, you’ll be facing traffic issues, some of your building will not be producing anymore because they have too many articles in their storage, or events such as locusts that destroy your seasonal crops, for example. You’ll also have contracts popping up from all towns, but it will be a bidding competition between you and the other entrepreneurs (AI) which can cost a fair bit, but these contracts can be very lucrative too. At the end of the day, you’ll be the one judging if it is a go or a no go!   There are other events, but I’ll leave you the pleasure of finding them out by yourself.

What I like about this game is that if you are into micro-management, the game is well done. You can set all the destinations yourself or just use warehouses to do it automatically for you. Personally, I preferred to do everything myself and it became quite busy as I was finding new technologies, towns were growing and contracts were coming in left, right and centre.     

You can adjust the speed of the gameplay at any given time, as you would expect in this genre of game, which is always good news in one aspect, and not so good news in another, as you might miss one or two things along the way.

I really like the graphics and the game runs very well. There are plenty of settings options, from interface, visual and sound to key binding to make sure you get the best experience possible while playing the game.


Positives

+ Great graphics
+ Over 150 products to create
+ Well-balanced game
+ Few mods of play (career, scenarios and sandbox)
+ Good tutorial
+ Achievement and trading cards

Negatives

- A bit repetitive as you understand how to play the game

Review Summary

Be as competitive as you can. Develop industries, produce and distribute goods to towns and become the top entrepreneur, in Rise of Industry!

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Zeepond Rating: 7/10

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