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Industries of Titan review: a curious hybrid builder that’s less than the sum of its partsThe moon and a stick
The moon and a stick
I imagineIndustries Of Titanstarted out as an ambitious concept. A hybrid of a factory layout/logistics sim, integrated into acity builder, combined with an RTS, all wrapped up in a satirical dystopia encouraging you to be the most appalling villainous hypercapitalist possible.
All of those parts are present, and as a bonus it’s incredibly gorgeous, with strong voice acting and a distinctive soundtrack that will haunt my head for weeks. Most of its parts are made to a high standard, it’s tragic that its final design just doesn’t work at all.
Industries of Titan 1.0 Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
Industries of Titan 1.0 Launch Trailer
But every other building besides the starting one (a “factory”, ie an empty room) is specialised to produce one thing, with no internals. As soon as you have enough money to unlock these, you’ll bulldoze every “factory” except the one that’s condensing your resources and never look inside it again. The internals have a very different (worse) interface and feels like vestiges of an earlier design that wasn’t properly expunged.
Citizens have no needs beyond minimising pollution, which is very easy as they never go anywhere. There’s no reason to pay any attention to them at all besides replacing them when they die. They never complain or rebel and their onely use is producing money, and being converted into the ‘Employees’ who do the actual work. This means shoving them into a machine that turns them into automatons, butthey already wereonly now you pay them a wage? What?
This is the only truly evil thing you do. It’s toothless and disconnected from anything else. Rebels periodically attack from distant bases, but they might as well be aliens or zombies for all the interaction you have. “We know you’re taking money from the council,” said one in their first broadcast. “I’m bloody not! I wish I was!” was my immediate thought. InTropico, every rebel was a former citizen with objections to your politics. On Titan, you’re supposedly the baddies but never feel any culpability or any kind of relationship with anyone. It’s never clear why you’d accommodate a thousand citizens to generate wages for a few hundred lobotomised labourers instead of simply hiring the citizens.
Once you’ve made enough money, you can unlock some building types, but then it never matters again. All your other resources go into slooowly spreading across the map, and you find yourself asking why you’re actually here. The obvious assumption is to wipe out the rebels and rival founders, right? Corporate rivalry turned unofficial war? Well, sort of. Build shipyards (each supports only two ships), and labs to research better hulls and equipment. Shipbuilding itself becomes a chore, as you’re suddenly, many hours later, returned to placing building internals. You design each ship’s layout, placing components onto awkwardly shaped grids, then crew it with spare employees.
Ships can fight rebels and other rival ships, and you can even view their internals to watch crew scurry about, FTL-style, operating weapons and putting out fires as you optionally target specific enemy components. It looks superb, but it’s completely pointless because whoever’s ships have the most HP will win, very slowly, without moving. Even at triple speed, everything takes forever to shoot down. Incredibly, you can’t even control multiple ships at once. In 2023! Controlling a fleet becomes another chore that undermines the beautiful combat effects, and what should be the joyous way enemy buildings take collateral damage and spread fire to each other (which workers have to be manually told to put out. Christ).
If it’s a satire of target-setting culture it falls flat again because it’s never clear who the Council are or what they want. They never ask for anything, money is irrelevant, your rivals are so static that they might as well not exist, and I was dismissing its inconsequential character transmissions within a day because they felt like alt-tabbing to a different game.
That’s the fundamental problem with Industries of Titan. It’s a beautifully animated and scored game with the bones of a great city builder/slower-paced RTS, and the flesh of a management game full of dystopian satire and cheerfully amoral characters, but no tendons. Everything flopping about in a kind of cool but dissatisfying pile. I could complain about UI niggles, the excessive time spent waiting around, and the predictability of every map (discounting the visuals, which make it probably the prettiest strategy game ever). But none of those things undermine it so critically as the persistent feeling that it’s far less than the sum of its parts.
