Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic – The Review

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BY SWIN

Welcome to the Revolution Comrade!

Workers and Resources Soviet Republic may be a mouthful of a title, but it is an effective one; In this game you are in charge of literally everything. From the placement of new towns and collectives to the managing and upgrading of pre-revolution villages so all may live in one glorious revolution!

In regular city builder and management games, you simply place a “zone” for buildings to go, be they houses, or shops etc. Not so in Workers Republic, the game takes micromanaging to a whole new level. Rather than zoning areas of land (so upstart capitalists can profit from the people by building them houses) it is down to you, the head of the local collective, to place each individual block of flats, each individual grocery store, every single one of them.

Step two, make sure it is supplied with workers, either by building a block of flats so the mine is within walking distance, or playing with bus routes (Which I’ll get to later). Step three, run a conveyor belt, which can only go in straight lines, to either the correct type of warehouse, or a coal ore processing plant; this is where lots of demolishing and rebuilding occurred as there are specific inputs and outputs for conveyor belts, so buildings need to be built at a very specific angle to each other.

The Revolution arrives via Bus.

I found working all that out by myself and setting up an infrastructure for it all more of a headache than it was rewarding. With nearly every production building requiring power to run, it keeping supply and demand balanced was not a task I was wholly looking forward too.

Let’s move onto more fun stuff. The other advantage of starting on a pre built map was I was able to ignore the city builder aspect for a while and focus on the the transport tycoon element.

With a pre built map, it was very easy to add bus stations to some of the bigger settlements and run a bus route between them all, hey presto! Freedom of movement for all the hard working comrades!

Setting this up was a much simpler task than powering the city, as all it took was the building of a vehicle bay, and buying some buses. There’s a good selection of vehicles, from what was basically a van with seats to something which could have resembled a soviet version of a 60’s American Greyhound coach. Each vehicle has varying stats to differentiate them, so while some had a higher top speed, they had less seats so couldn’t carry as many passengers, while some were the other way round, and some were a balance in the middle. I plumped for big buses and prioritised carrying capacity, as the pre built roads were still only surfaced with gravel and not proper tarmac roads.

What was I doing again?

Once I had the beginnings setup, I had two towns powered, and supplied with food all on the central bus route, the lack of end goal or ultimate destination became very apparent. With no campaign or story mode in the game, and just the one map in this sandbox mode, the game suddenly felt somewhat flat to me.

I could expand aimlessly, and setup another source of power with its own coal source and power some more towns, or move into creating concrete, or digging for oil, but to what end? Yes I am able to export goods at the border checkpoints earning me more money, Rubles or American Dollars both being useable currencies in the game, but it's ultimately a little pointless as there's no goals to achieve, no checklist to tick off. Which for some people may be its own reward and how they like to play, but I always prefer set scenarios, some structure and parameters in these style of games.

This was until I suddenly lost power, as the flats I’d built near the power plant, no longer had people living in them due to a lack of services in the area. Oh joy, time to sort out this new problem and reroute a bunch of transport lines. Once that was sorted it was back to scouting out locations for potential expansion options, which in doing so highlighted another problem with this game...

With a map this big, and all this space, and all these small towns, where was I again? Which way did I go? Where is all the stuff I’ve built? The lack of minimap on a block of land this size meant for the first time ever, I got lost in a top down game.