HomeReviewsIndustries of Titan
Premature Evaluation: Industries Of TitanThe perfect name
The perfect name
Developer:Brace Yourself GamesPublisher:Brace Yourself Games
Release:Out nowOn:WindowsFrom:EpicFor:£24, $30, €27
Industries Of Titanhas a refreshing attitude towards dirt and grime. Most city builders prefer to clutch their pearls when it comes to the unpleasant matter of pollution, chastising mayors as they construct the elaborate sewage networks required in order to pump vast quantities of human gunk into whichever unfortunate body of water happens to be farthest from your town hall. Hand-wringing civic advisors wag an accusatory finger as you redraw the boundaries of your landfill site, wider and wider, before delicately placing incinerators on top like it’s a big brown birthday cake.
Set on an already noxious Saturnian moon, Industries Of Titan is a city management game that embraces filth. Pollution is there to be managed, but everybody is fairly grown up and forgiving about it. Plonk a few smokestacks down and your settlement’s garbage is all burnt up and pumped out into the methane-rich (meaning it stinks of farts even without your intervention) atmosphere, becoming some other idiot’s problem. That idiot might be your future self, yes, but that guy probably deserves everything coming to them.
The two layers of the game operate in tandem as your workers excavate minerals and isotopes from the environment and physically place them inside storage contained within buildings. Where most other city builders obfuscate this aspect with some handwavey notion of an unseen, amorphous stockpile being filled or depleted, Industries Of Titan falls more in line with the likes of Rimworld andDwarf Fortress, and has your collected resources exist right there in the world. A problem in the city view, like a gun turret losing energy and going limp, can usually be traced back to something very specific having gone wrong on one of the floors of your buildings.
There are the barebone elements of conflict in place, as belligerent rebels will turn up every 15 minutes or so to bombard your city with their chonky attack ships. A few well positioned turrets can fend them off, but later updates promise some hot ship-on-ship action and a more fully developed combat system. Industries Of Titan has one the beefiest roadmaps I’ve seen of any early access title, waving an anxiety-inducing to-do list at you each time you load it up: production lines and transportation networks for moving resources around, the potential for your residents to become miserable and rowdy, quests and farms and rival corporations. What’s available now amounts to a foundation on which the rest of the game will eventually be built. If Industries Of Titan were a jigsaw, the developers have only just finished assembling all the edge pieces.
But what’s here is already a little bit magic. Industries Of Titan looks absolutely beautiful, a wet metalBlade Runnercityscape rendered in voxels and set to an industrial electronic soundtrack that puts me in mind of something Kavinsky would produce if he were ever locked in a basement and fed entirely on a diet of Philip K. Dick novels. The interface is slicker than those of most finished games, and there’s unexpected detail throughout, such as how each building in your city makes a distinct sound, so you can oftenheara problem before you see it.
There might be diddly squit to do in this version besides build and build and gawp at the pretty scenery, but Brace Yourself Games has gotten everything right so far and I suspect they’ll continue to nail it as they expand into new features. This is a classic city builder in the making, but it’s best to wait until it’s a little more, well,made.
