Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic challenges you to uplift a poor nation through communist ideals.
Velcome Comrade, the Soviet Government has chosen you for the promotion to chief architect of the developing regions. Your job entails creating new towns, managing them and making them grow for the glory of the people! Do not fail in Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic.
As the absolute ruler of a small Soviet era town you have a few simple goals; to make a large profitable and well functioning town. You do this in the traditional city builder way of sticking down buildings, roads and other various utilities to form a functioning society. Towns are very small and personalised, especially when the exact positioning of every apartment block or pedestrian path is chosen individually by yourself.
Building is rather simple, all structures being prefabs you plonk down and connect to the various transportation networks. In this version of Soviet era Russia, personal cars do not exist and so your populace have two methods of transportation available; walking or the bus. This means that cities have this delightful mix of roads and footpaths linking everything up. Since people cannot walk far, busses must be set up to ferry people from housing areas to amenities.
Another delightful aspect of Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (WaRSR) is how vehicles in general function. In other city builders, making a bus route is as simple as linking up a few bus stops at which point busses will appear. In contrast in WaRSR you must independently purchase busses from a wide variety, then set up a route of bus stops before they then set off on their route. Similarly, when setting up farms you need to buy tractors, harvesters and trucks required, all with several classes and different attributes. This makes your industries much more personal, seeing the truck that you bought and set to work driving down the road hauling a cargo of corn feels very cool.
The soviet theming is more than skin deep, with many mechanics in WaRSR working with this theme. As befitting Soviet era Russia personal transportation is limited (there are currently no personal cars but cars are promised in a future update) and obviously befitting a communist country there is no tax or costs for citizens. Money is only used in trade, earned by exporting goods to both the soviet bloc and the dirty capitalist western countries, and is used to purchase good you don’t have, from building supplies you don’t have on hand to consumer goods you don’t a supply chain of goods for your shopping centers.
Sadly there are a few downsides to Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, one of the largest being the lack of a tutorial — your only help being a little instructions booklet which more introduces concepts of the world more than actual help with game mechanics. This resulted in my lovely little town being more than a little dysfunctional as I slowly tried to learn how everything fits together. I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to move goods from warehouses to stores, and sadly WaRSR seems to suffer from the common problem of snapping, with my town being redesigned several times just so a single piece of path will hook up to a road crossing.
While there are a few difficulties, WaRSR is overall a fun and unique city builder, using its theme to give a fresh twist on the city builder experience that is more than welcome.
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is available now on PC
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