SteamWorld Build Review (Xbox Series X|S)

Thunderful (an amalgamation of Swedish indie devs Image & Form and Zoink) has been delighting us with its clunkety, clankety retro-futuristic SteamWorld series since SteamWorld Tower Defence on the Nintendo DSi all the way back in 2010. While that particular game may not have been the most explosive of starts - it's definitely the weakest game in the series - it laid a solid foundation for a string of excellent adventures to follow, and it's a foundation we return to in SteamWorld Build, a game that combines tower defence with city-building and SteamWorld Dig-styled mining to wonderful effect.

Yes, let's not beat around the bush here, SteamWorld Build is an absolute cracker. We knew it would be good, this dev team has yet to drop the ball with an impressive streak of top-notch indie titles in Dig, SteamWorld Heist and, more recently, SteamWorld Quest, but we've been taken aback a little here by how this melding of so many different mechanics and ideas has ended up being such a smooth and exhilarating ride.

As with every other offering in this franchise, it's all about setting teams of wonderfully characterful steampunk robots to work to achieve your aims and, once the ball gets rolling on this city-building adventure, it really does take off at speed, delicately layering on levels of mechanics as we're filled in on the simple overarching plot (secret tech buried in the ground, dig it up to make a rocket and escape). OK, that's not a very thorough plot synopsis, but it's enough to ensure we don't ruin any of the lovely little surprises along the way in a tale that does more than enough to keep you hooked over the course of the main campaign.

Kicking off with a new game, you're given a choice of five different stages in which to start building your dinky little robot mining town. We chose a dusty desert location and got to work placing our most basic worker residences. Once you've got your first houses down, you're prompted to locate resources - trees and the like - before setting up some mills and warehouses and getting some cold hard cash in your bank. Keep expanding, building amenities for your metal minions to keep them happy and you'll quickly unlock the ability to upgrade worker houses to mining residences. Now we can start thinking about heading underground!

See, as much as SteamWorld Build is a fully-fledged city-builder, with all of the furious clicking around, building, demolishing, redesigning and micro-managing that the genre entails, it also expects you to dig down a little further, to manage a burgeoning steampunk city whilst also exploring the dark depths underneath your newly laid streets.

Shifting the side-scrolling resource gathering and mine-puzzling of the SteamWorld Dig games (y'know, just some of the best indie games we've ever played) to a top-down perspective, the mining aspect of Build charges you with discovering vital resources. You'll need to find dirty water, rich mineral veins, and all manner of treasures and technology over several levels, levels which you can travel between instantaneously with the push of a button.

Whilst in the mines you hover over big chunky blocks and select them to have your miners dig and a fun little puzzle game quickly develops as you work out how to reach all of those sweet mineral veins and goodies. You can only dig certain types of earth to start out, with bedrock, granite and so on holding you back from progressing. Upgrade your miners and tech over time and you'll be pummeling through every material you come up against with ease, scanning deeper with fancy radars and working to excavate as much as you can in an efficient manner.

Within just a few hours you've got multiple floors of management mayhem to consider, but here's the thing, SteamWorld Build eschews a lot of the inherent frustration that can be found in the city-building/resource management genre by being fantastically well put together and organized from the get-go. Every vital piece of information; the contentment percentages of your population, required amenities, breakdowns in resource chains...everything you need to know at any time is presented on the screen in easy-to-parse info boxes. There's also a detailed notebook in the pause menu for you to reference at any time that very clearly outlines every mechanic with descriptions and pictures so you can take a minute to check on anything you can't quite get your head around.

With your adventure now properly progressing you'll find pieces of mysterious tech underground that give you the means to advance your civilization and introduce all-manner of fancy new technology, shifting from tumbleweed and sawdust to maglevs and space-aged fanciness, with the final aim of building a great big rocket ship that'll blast you and the denizens of your city into space, saving you all from a dying planet. To extract all of the tech required, you'll progress your robot citizens from simple workers to miners, prospectors, tech experts, aristocratic moneybags and more besides. Again, we don't want to give too much away here, the discovery of new tech, new buildings, industries, robot types and so on is all part of the fun that keeps you nibbling away for hours on this one, but rest assured that Thunderful has designed a very satisfying curve of progression to work through.

For fans of fine detail there's lots of fun to be had here too in just zooming right in on your city as it develops, getting right in close to the streets to watch and listen as robots chatter and get busy with their day to day tasks. Saloons, burger joints, great big factories, lush farmland, it's all presented in great detail and there are tons of extras such as animals, parks, seating, statues, signs and all of that good stuff so you can get to work designing and personalising a world where your metal pals get to chill out when they aren't working.

Alongside all of this delightful exploration and expansion, you'll also have to deal with some enemies along the way, requiring the development of guards, turrets and other counter-measures as the tower defense aspect of proceedings kick into gear a few hours down the line. The further underground you go, the more defending you'll need to do, and every level gives you both new resources and goodies as well as new enemy hordes to push back from getting their hands on all your lovely swag. You'll also need to watch out for quakes, with the ground rumbling as a warning that you may need to consider installing pillar supports so that cave-ins don't kill or maim a whole bunch of your workers.

So we've got city-building, tower-defence and mining puzzles to engage with all at once here and, honestly, when you say it like that it's the sort of proposition that makes this particular writer feel very tired. Maybe it's considered heresy to admit but there's something about the city-building genre that feels like a bit of an uphill struggle when you're getting started, and we often find ourselves getting lost, confused and at times a little overwhelmed and annoyed by all the micro-management required to succeed. If the idea of this game makes you feel that way, we get it! However, SteamWorld Build, for the most part, manages to avoid the vast majority of these annoyances and concerns by being incredibly polished and well put together. For the most part.

We did have a few instances of feeling a little lost at times, a handful of occasions when we weren't quite sure how to generate the resources required or raise citizen satisfaction to a level where we could upgrade to new types of robot. The biggest example of this involved upgrading a bunch of miner houses to aristocrat residences, something that was required to move the story along, but for a little while we just couldn't get a handle on the fact we needed to upgrade our mining endeavours to make use of dirty water deposits that would provide clean water for the folk up top. 99% of the time this game makes it simple, but there was the odd instance where we felt like certain aspects - such as dirty water collection - weren't explained clearly enough or in time so that we didn't find ourselves wondering what to do next. A rare occurrence, and still more user-friendly than a lot of pure city-builders, but it does happen.

There is also currently a little bit of an issue when you switch to the game's quality graphical mode right now. We were actually a little surprised to find this one had a selection of modes to choose from - and honestly we've yet to spot much of a difference between the two - but there are some niggling framerate issues in quality mode, with a very slight micro-stuttering of sorts as you pan the camera around. It's an issue that's easily overlooked for now though, as we can't really see any reason to stick this one into quality mode anyway, but worth noting.

Thunderful has form, and it hasn't dropped the ball here. There's something so wonderfully satisfying, evocative and fun about the games this team makes, they always look and feel fantastic to play, are delivered fully-functioning and bug-free, and things are no different with this latest addition. If you're going to take so many different mechanics and work them together into something that feels this slick, smooth and addictive you're gonna need some mad skills, and this dev team has proven time and again they can pay their skill bills with style to spare.

And really, what more is there to say? SteamWorld Build has been on our radars since it was first announced thanks to how much we've enjoyed all of this dev's previous efforts. Is it as majestic as the Dig games and SteamWorld Heist? Well, the fact we need time to consider that question at all tells you everything you need to know about how much we've enjoyed our time with this. 2023 just dropped another cracker.