Industries of Titan

Abandoned, don't buy.

An unfinished game pushed out the door with zero ceremony after the developer ran out of money, hastily finished by being farmed out to a troubleshooter studio who did the bare minimum to bring the game to a "complete" standard. The gameplay itself is an interesting city builder entirely subsumed by a mediocre-at-best, dull as dishwater pseudo-RTS. I can't in good faith recommend this game.

abandoned, no updates since 2023, broken and unfinished

Gorgeous and varied landscapes, intriguingly detailed voxel-based art style, a bangin' soundtrack, some very solid voice work and decent gallery of characters... so why all the negative reviews? Well, there are reasons. There are certainly... reasons. First off, the price point. It's a bit high. Not "Paradox gouging you for thematic/cosmetics DLCs" high, but Industries of Titan sits at 29 euro in my region, where I would expect around 20 for a game of this scale and content quantity. Furthermore, we have an uncomfortable inevitability to face in that Yes, We Are The Baddies. The game is about being some rich prick, jetting to the largest moon of Saturn to build a horrible new ad-funded society by turning a bunch of desperate people into cyber-zombie slaves ("employees" is a bit of a euphemism, you see) and [i]maybe[/i] trying to keep the rest of them breathing air clean enough that they do not constantly die from it. If you can even afford to do that. All the while, you're collaborating with the plutocratic oligarchs of the Council, who claim ownership of Titan by right of being the richest, oldest, cruelest bastards, as far as I can tell; bribing them to grant you more land and resources, or money to unlock vital building designs, all that kind of thing. And at regular intervals, you are attacked by the oppressed rebel factions, who really, really don't like the Council for some reason. Might be to do with the cyber-zombie slavery or the countless preventable deaths by pollution, atmospheric toxicity and so forth. Who can say! So you either attack the rebels right back, or blow up the ships they keep sending until you reach your goals for the current map. There are reviewers who say the game is unfinished, abandoned. They are not [i]exactly[/i] wrong; there is very much the shadow of a larger, more developed, more polished and more complete experience looming over what we ended up getting, and the patch notes do appear to have stopped a couple of years ago. A real shame. Notably, the rival corporations and their leaders are pretty much only there in a ceremonial sense; you get drip-fed audio clips of them scheming and demonstrating their various personalities as you play, but these mostly just hint at a world that was never fleshed out. Ryn Kierke, the absolute jackoff, will boast of the huge doom fleets that are his personal claim to power on Titan - then you play a scenario with him as the rival, and he has... one ship. A small one. Which you can blow up, along with his HQ and defence turret, without much trouble at all, using two or three of your own ships. The rebels are FAR more of a threat, which seems strange. In short: Rivals are not a threat. Dunno if they build up a bit more at higher Rebel Danger levels, I tended to avoid the highest of those because fighting in this game is... not fun. It's tactical. You pick where to fire each of your ships' guns, if you like. You kind of need to, or they'll fight VERY inefficiently. Whereas if you do the following, you will generally win: Build a tier 2 ship. Put three laser guns on it. Small or medium will do. Engage enemy ship. Target a gunner's seat by one of their weapons. Avoid fully destroying the weapon. The enemy crew will attempt to man their weapon, get hit with three hits in quick succession, and die. When all enemy crew are gone, their ship explodes. They can't shoot back effectively because their gunners keep dying. Easy win... relatively. Especially if you have two ships shooting at both of the enemy's gunner seats (or more, on larger vessels, which are somewhat more resistant to this tactic due to simply having so many more crew members). This is not fun to do over and over, just to get rid of enemy ships. Defence turrets exist, but are not great. They do the job, more of less. Whittle ships down with sheer damage. Inefficient, kind of boring to watch. The refinement system is messy. It's a neat idea, which can work well, once you finally get everything figured out, your factory floors efficiently laid out, your cyber-zombie workforce properly staffed, all that jazz. One mineral becomes five, and then that becomes twenty-five. You do have to set construction resources to the most refined minerals manually in many cases, as the game is INCREDIBLY dumb about "savings". Like: You want to build a thing that costs four minerals. Do you spend FOUR SINGLES, or ONE five-value mineral? Knowing that you can make three more five-value ones from the spent ones. Yeah, the auto mode has your workers haul four separate lumps of unprocessed mineral to waste on that one object, in this scenario. Similarly, a road costs twenty. Four fives, or a single twenty-five? Well, four fives, of course! Wouldn't want to waste ONE step of processing when you can waste THREE! Every. Single. Road. Tile. But yeah. You can do it manually, and you should, and you probably will, if you want to succeed. All of that said? At the point where you have processing running smoothly, a residence for citizens, an office for them to work in, enough fuel and energy to run those things, maybe an air cleaner and a garbage burner if you're feeling fancy, and something to keep the rebels away... the current scenario is pretty much over. Your rival essentially can't do anything, and the rebels are a nuisance until survival mode, at which point they become... a greater nuisance? So then, you're left with a checklist of objectives to tick off by, for instance, building and running TEN hospitals. For reference, you need one, maybe two, in any sanely designed city. Often zero, as people get sick from pollution and you can just build a pollution filter in the middle of your residential district instead. The way this game ended up, makes me sad. It's got a great soundtrack, it's got some great art, it's got the bones of a narrative and characters with personality whom you sort of just never really interact with, apart from receiving gameplay tips from your assorted colorful advisors. It could have been more. It should have been more. But for whatever reason, the Necrodancer-and-Cobalt-Core devs didn't feel the need to finish what they started. More polish would be so welcome; an ambient audio slider so one can hear the rain and other weather effects, fixes for various bugs, better AI for employees, a specific, priority-settable task category for Clean Residential Buildings (which can otherwise clog up with trash while your cyber-zombies very slowly sweep the ever-refuse-inundated factory floor)... and real interactions with your rivals, like he opponents in Age of Empires III skirmishes bantering with you as they send armies and note your actions. Gameplay and narrative intertwined - that is one of the things this game is still mostly missing. The campaign is alright. You build up "favor" from performing well in scenarios, allowing you to get more and more of a headstart on future maps. There's a good variety of map types - barren, boggy, volcanic, icy, sandy and so forth. The victory is anticlimactic, as one might expect. "Good job, now you're on the Council. Welcome, fellow bastard." What there is of this game, is largely okay. Some neat ideas, some poor execution, some questionable themes, and a lot of very lovely elements that are enjoyable in and of themselves. Taken as a whole, as a video game, it's not as good as it should be. Kinda-sorta recommended, but wait for a sale. If the devs don't care enough to properly finish their game, then you shouldn't have to pay full price for it.

Unfinished early access. Showed promise but ultimately abandoned.

I like this game then they kept adding bad updates and then just stopped. That kinda hurt my soul. o well it was fun while it lasted

Memory leaks, too many missing quality of life features, too much micro and finnicky controls to handle ships.

Weak gameplay. To get twice as much stuff, you just copy and paste that much stuff. The end. The most interesting system is how some buildings interact with the atmosphere in a weird pattern so you do a bit of overlapping tetris (somewhat better than regular tetromino packing)

Even though the game feels a bit unfinished (missing mechanics mentioned in some places, very rare crashes, a campaign that feels like it's held together with a bit of tape...) there's still enough in here to keep you going for a few hours, or at least one round of the campaign. The music is pretty good and the art style/setting is also interesting. For a game with with similar vibes check out Ixion.

I like it. I finished the campaign and there's not a ton of replay value. You can tell the devs had more planned and pushed this out early but if you get it on sale it's a decent game.