Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic

this is possibly one of the best city builder's i've ever played. you can gather needed recources build your own cities even manufacture your own goods for people in your country. this game has everything all city builders should have but don't the level of details are amazing. though granted there is a few problems here and their but all games have some negatives this one people tend to leave the jobs far too fast when you have to shuffle them to their jobs but at least you can dump them on the jobs with multiple trips. I would highly recomend this game hands down.

What an exceptional game!

at first i was playing the campaign and i thought this isnt so hard

Then i figured out there is an expert mode, and oh boy what a treat.
You need to watch some youtube vids to know what the hell is going on but if you find the right guide it will take about 20 min to learn the basics

Best city building game i ever played, reminds me a little bit of tropico also but much more complex

I would like to see better animations for the people that walk around, they all kinda generic

So why a thumbs down?
Cuz i had like 25 crashes in 20 hours of gameplay

Very in-depth but with options. Lots of options. If one aspect is too difficult - get rid! The tutorial is a pain to complete but does give you the overview of what's what.

Really like the concept and some of the content, but the interface is very challenging and the transportation modes are frustrating (adding transit stops requires destroying roads and buildings... for a bus stop!). Hoping they sort out some of these things as this is a very promising game... but its not ready for broad use.

The Good

The Bad

The Ugly

Verdict

5/10

It's lacking way too many QOL features, to where its a chore to play. those 9 hours i played were mostly spent trying to figure out wtf the issue was, and unlike a paradox game or dwarf fortress or rimworld, there is literrally no way to know. no menu records why people arent able to buy meat for example, theres no way to know why. at all. there arent even the features needed to figure out why. you just have to keep guessing and hope it might have been fixed. if i want to delete an old pipe, i have to randomly click around and hope i deleted it because it doesnt tell you where the pipes are even are. Its also really buggy, stats dissapear, menus glitch, statuses dont update, etc. its fun but needs way way more optimization to be enjoyable for me

This game is much more than just Cities: Skylines but Communist. You manage cities, mining towns, import and export, individual factories, powerplants, houses, universities, it's basically a micromanaging simulator. It can be difficult at times, and that's supposed to be the point of the game.

TL:DR: The Dark Souls of city-building.

Wow. Great stuff for those fans of OpenTTD, Transport Fever, and Cities Skylines.

The best in depth city builder out there. A bit hard to learn but once you get going on realistic settings imposible to stop.

This game is very good. One of the best city builders I have played recently. It is very hard though. I think I heard one reviewer describe it as "A command economy, so you better COMMAND it."

It's taken me some time to really start enjoying this city builder, at times it's felt way too much, impossible and dry, some months I didn't even play it.
However at about 40 hours of play it all started to fall into place, and I've got to say it's a remarkable game. If you've any interest in either the cold war, socialist states or city builders then I think you'll love this. Highly recommended.

This is a good city builder. Maybe even the best city builder. But its best features - layers and layers of production and distribution chains, and authentic Eastern European-ness* - are also its worst features. It really depends on what kind of player you are whether you'll love it or hate it.

Even if it looks similar on the surface, this game is almost the opposite of something like Cities: Skylines in many ways: it simulates a centrally planned economy, which in effect means you have to plan virtually every detail yourself. You don't just plop down a commercial or residential zone, you put down each and every building yourself (though you can copy-paste town layouts to a certain extent), and then have to make sure that all of its (and its workers or residents') requirements are met - and there are many requirements. You have to manage supply chains, buy vehicles and set up routines for them, and deal with assigning tasks for everything from fuel supply to snow removal. And the documentation for all of it is actually pretty limited - you have to look through forum posts and youtube videos to really get an understanding of what's happening. The learning curve is a cliff - but the rewards are great too. When something comes together like clockwork it can be immensely satisfying. Playing on Realistic mode is slow as you have to wait for construction materials and workers to make their way up the transportation chain, but this really is a game where you can put in hundreds or thousands of hours and feel like you're still learning and earning your communist glory. See that 70-ish hours I played so far? I feel like I'm just barely getting past absolute beginner phase with this game, and I'm a quick learner. This is a game for the long haul if you vibe with it.

As for the authentic Eastern European-ness* of this game - on the one hand, the game is oozing with atmosphere and its gameplay mechanics really do make it feel different from the Western city builders we're all used to, you really have to put yourself in the mind of a socialist economy planner, not a benevolent capitalist. Keeping your citizens happy and loyal isn't just a score thing, either - one of the greatest threats to a republic in this game is "brain drain": you have to educate your population, and then get them to actually stay (rather than flee to the decadent West), and that can be a real tricky task.

But it's also a very Eastern European* game in a very different way: there is a stereotype of games developed in that part of the world being incredibly ambitious but janky and obtuse, and WR:SR absolutely fits that to a T. Luckily, it's been out for years so most of the outright bugs have been fixed - but you'll still be scratching your head at the UI a lot of the time, and trying to figure out why something is not working can be a real ordeal (and it often won't be for weird reasons). Some of the game mechanics are also downright odd: vehicles don't have drivers (that count as part of the population/workforce, anyway) and commuting only works one way (i.e. workers only go from home to work, not back) and without transfers. The biggest skill by far in playing this game is just learning to diagnose problems - with the UI and notification system often not being a whole lot of help. You often literally have to click on buildings or find individual workers to even figure out that there is a problem going on in the first place, and because of the slow pace and the time it takes for problems to filter down the many production and distrubution chains - it's easy for even a catastrophic problem to develop without you knowing until it's too late. So you really have to play detective a lot here, the game will not hold your hand.

All that said - if you don't mind the learning cliff and the sheer amount of time this game inevitably takes up... this game is pretty brilliant. Absolutely not for everyone, but fantastic for the right person.

(* I was born in an actual Soviet republic, so I think I'm allowed to say that :P )

Come a long way and this game really scratches my micromanaging itch. City builder, society planner, and great economic feedback. Great data pushed back to you while you're playing but not overwhelming. Gets into the nitty gritty without needing an accounting degree.

Some polish still needed as far as UI navigation but overall would always recommend. Great game.

I've bought it a while ago and played a little, when it was still in early access and the game looked totally promising. About the gameplay, unfortunately, it's totally inaccessible. Finally I came back to it, started a new city, played for less than half an hour, literally had build nothing yet (just set up a few construction sites) and then the game crashed (froze, had to kill it). Not sure if I should try again?

Edit: Game keeps crashing when Alt-Tabbing between game and youtube (because you need some youtube tutorial, when you want to play this game). Totally disappointing.

Further Edit:
* Translation to my default language is worse.
* Build menu for storage and grain storage do have all the same items, there is no difference
* Ironically, you will find the end station for busses not within the menu of bus stations.
* And it keeps crashing as soon as you switch to another application (see above, I was searching for the bus end station, couldn't find it and therefore alt-tabbed to my browser, and yet it crashed again).

Not being an alpha or beta-version, this is unacceptable.

Another edit: It gets even better. To fix the crash, the developer tells to start the game in windowed mode. But the check box for windowed mode is grayed out - on purpose by the developer! Any internet meme cat would say now: wut iz dis?

Hands down one of the best city sims especially if you want a challenge which you can fail unlike some games where money will come in no matter what!

Played since early early access. This is the Railroad Tycoon 3 of City builders. The real-socialist setting makes perfect sense for this type of game. Some stereotypes like secret police and, probably not humorously meant, kitsch added on top, but that's fine. At its core this is an excellent agent-based simulation of all kinds of infrastructure and logistics systems at a sufficiently high level of complexity that can be adjusted depending on desired difficulty while true enough to physical laws.

The game is a bit of a battle between organic growth and pre-planning. How to focus and dimension cities and production chains whilst taking care of citizens, existing settlements, while adjusting to the possibilities of progressing technology.

Realistic mode is a double edged sword, it can be very slow until reaching self sufficiency (perhaps in-game decades) but rewarding in that it involves the player in every step through all layers of game systems. Once the economy gets sustainable, progress turns exponential as long as bottlenecks are taken care of (preferably early on). Here the construction can prove robust enough, or if the constellations align, turn into a spiral where citizen defections could lead to a domino of multiple systems. For some projects you just have to save and let the game run unsupervised. Faster game speeds and possibly slower in game date progression could help with that.

Earlier starts, like early 1900ies would be a welcome addition. But some mods provide that.

Tutorial 2 is a bit of a tedium, I suggest that you just jump into the game and explore instead.

The best city builder I have ever played. Any aspect that is not perfect in the base game is easily modded to preference. It is not an understatement to say that this is one of the most interesting and in-depth games ever made.

Beware the learning curve, though, and just try to have fun. Not every play through has to be hyper-realistic

Its really deep. You start simple and then the game will get gradually more complex. You feel really great when you figure out how something works!!!

Very unique and special game - did not have as much fun with anything else in the past decade! Highly recommend giving it a go

Simply the best city-builder since a loooong time. Just add the walls, laws and make the capitalism an option with taxes and prices (yea I know, I said "an option") and it will be the best city builder ever, even counting the first SimCity's (If it's not already the case).

The realistic mode (slow construction of buildings based on your resources -imported or crafted locally- and your manpower -also imported or growned locally- instead of *pop* spawning the building from your wallet like other city-builders) is incredibly challenging and I love it.

Plus it's very well optimized, even running on a potato PC.

I would just like more road types and the ability to edit the pathways on them, to make beautiful crossroads with asymetrical lanes, etc. But it's already incredible and you did an amazing work.

(I love this game)

Great game, great value for the price. You may customize it as you want. From hardcore incredibly complex building strategy to relaxed sandboxy game and anything in between.
Only minus i can find: It's bit ugly.

Very good game, from easy to very hard to play. Building a city a second time is a must you learn from your mistakes

The most detailed city builder game I've ever seen. You can play any level of realism and detail from simple building and road management all the way down to managing the garbage trucks and trucking lines. The modding community also has a broad range of mods that really help make the game even more detailed.

If your reaction to every game ever has been ; "Not enough micro management", then you will like this game. It is a dangerously good game.

I have been playing video games since AoE and Half-life took me...
In realistic mode, this game is easily one of the best I've ever played.

I love this game, but I can't recommend it. It has crashed more than all other games I’ve ever played combined. It might run fine for a few hours, then suddenly start crashing as often as every 5 minutes. There’s no clear trigger, but crashes are inevitable. I even lost a save file because attempting to save again would cause a crash, even if it was the first thing I did after loading any auto-saves I had.

I’m playing the base game, fully updated, with the latest drivers and OS, no mods. I’ve reinstalled the game and started a fresh save, yet the problem persists. Contacting support seems pointless; they should’ve caught such issues in basic testing. This is buggier than CP2077 at launch.

Next, I’ll consider a full OS reinstall, hardware tests - the cleanest setup possible. But let’s be real - no other game or software causes issues like this. There’s no sign of software or hardware problems in any OS logs. And as a DevOps engineer, I would know. I'm 99.99% certain this is a game problem.

I like the complexity of the game, especially when playing the realistic mode. It took a lot of time to learn, but it was worth of it. I recommend 10/10.

Glory to the Union

Build a building, one click, simple! :)

Haha, no. [realistic mode is awesome!!!]

This is absolutely the best city builder I've ever played! There's the nostalgic Soviet aspect for those who appreciate it, but more than that, the key aspect of the game is realistic mode and the option to gradually build everything using resources! This is what makes the game brilliant! It's a shame that other games don't have this feature! Can't recommend it enough!

Game could be good but the in-game tutorial just sucks so you need to watch 3000 hours of tutorial videos on youtube to understand the basics of the game

Najlepšia slovenská hra, o ktorej sa nehovorí. Oplatí sa kúpou tejto hry podporiť slovenského indie vývojára, pretože hra si to naozaj zaslúži. Ďakujeme.

Hey! Thank you for such grateful city-building game! I'm back to my childhood, so cool memories.
Very interesting company, game mechanics, variants of social satisfaction, varied number of resources and nice ability to become real oil tycoon and nuclear power plant owner. Of course, nice to have return button for trains from railway construction office :-). And very cool feature that you can sit into the train and from the first view see the views of the railworld like a driver. By the way will be cool to see next things:
- some marker for company missions where you show resources extraction, I lost the place and had to build technical university and study resources map to continue the task (but one building from education task was built :-) )
- airport control tower should be placed after airport's checkpoint
- some strange mechanics for Ctrl+numpad 1,2 for acceleration of time, people stopped doing eating, working and begin to die - so may be declined these buttons or integrate them to the game
- pipeline at customs, will be nice to limit the sale like for the electricity
- and add something to recycle nuclear wastes or ability to blow up the nuclear power plant (joking)
Very cool, thank you for done work! I spent last two weeks without leaving PC all my free time!

This might be one of the greatest city builder games i've ever played. The amount of depth and precisiont you can make a city function is absolutely insane in this. My favorite part is that you can pick and choose what systems you want to operate in your game, making the difficulty based on each player. Keep in mind that each system, from power to waste to pollution is complex in their unique way. Worry about water pressure, voltage distribution, railway semaphores, all forms of trade, transit, money-making, and more in this game.

When I think of a planned economy sim, this is it.

I just got handle of power in this game (25 hrs), water and waste sounds crazy right now. Good luck to anyone who plays this, cause I'm losing it lol.

Still, a 10/10 game because it makes me think and plan a city at the same time.

Absolutely incredible game. It's a little janky at times and doesn't really conform to most city-builder style games, but it makes up for it in every other way. I had hoped Cities: Skylines II would take inspiration from this game and give us better production chains, but after playing this game, there's no going back to Cities: Skylines (or any other city builder for that matter). Every other city builder feels hollow, Anno, Cities Skylines, Sim City, Tropico. If you have any interest in games like those, and you enjoy games like Factorio, OpenTTD, or Transport Fever, you're going to love this game.

It's tough to get into at first, it does things weird, but all the information you need is there, it's just a matter of finding it. Hold off on Realistic Mode on your first game, and if the tutorials aren't enough (they aren't great) pull up bballjo on YouTube and watch his beginner tutorials. Once it clicks, it's the best city builder out there.

This game is epic. Basically it's sim city but more focus on economy and resources. But it's not too complex you can adjust the difficulty as you want and not control power water or sewage if you want. Or turn hen on if you want a realistic challenge.

Also the soundtrack is AMAZING

very addictive fun game once you figure out the mechanics...highly recommend.

Very fun and well-made simulation of socialist economics. Has a less of a learning curve and more of a learning cliff tho

This game is amazing. I've never seen such an in depth and detailed game before. If you are interested in logistics management games, this game is going to provide.

The game offers two campaigns that took me a combined 93 hours to complete, most of it was learning, failing, and restarting.

The game offers significant control over the difficulty. This allows players flexibility to choose how they want to play.

This is an amazing game! A very unique and creative take on a city/industry builder in general, full of ideas and mechanics I've never seen in any other game. If you play in realistic mode there are countless things and factors to consider, to worry about and to plan ahead. Unparalleled ways to customize cities and industries you build as well the ways that they are connected together.

Ofcourse the game is not without issues. The UI feels a little clunky and in a way has a feel of being from a 20yo game and so many mechanics and information might be very overwhelming to take in for a beginner player, but as soon as you start to understand how things work then the game really shines and you can really enjoy it. And since the game is out of early access, many things got drastically improved.

The difficulty options are especially nice, you can enable or disable pretty much every important aspect of the game so you can enjoy what you like and avoid things that you dislike or that make the game annoying to you.

Definitely recommend, I spent so much time in this game and will probably spend even more.

It's a bit rough around the edges, but the simulation is very enjoyable once you learn its quirks. Some aspects of the UI could definitely use improvement but overall an ambitiously fun project. I enjoy realism mode even though it arguably could use a FASTER simulation speed option than the x2.

Very nice city builder but a little bit overcomplicated and resources intensive. You can do pretty much everything you want, especially with mods. Graphics is from 2006 tho but thats in line with the soviet technology I guess.

Awesome city builder. There is a lot of detail to enjoy down to odometers on cars. I just beat the initial campaign, and having the trains roll out for the first time feels amazing. In terms of complexity, the game allows you to turn on and off the advanced features so the experience is accessible to all skill levels, but is generally geared towards city builder enthusiasts.

I've hated it, and loved it in a single day. Over 100 hours now? Only 1 decent layout. Made a lot of mistakes. Tons of resources and refining methods. There's no end!

The best, if not only amazing city sim game I have encountered. The learning curve is steep, BUT VERY well deserved for the game! And the thing that I enjoyed most about it was the unique play system, and realizm. THIS GAME IS COMPLICATED!!! So if you aren't willing to spend hours on learning the tutorial, or giving it a quick (which is still gonna be hours upon hours.) run, probably go back to the drawing board for your choice to buy the game. Though, if you are tired and bored of the larger collection of generic games that try to "replicate" what it has to offer nonetheless, this game will most likely be for you. Also, the price tag will only apply to those who will know for a fact they will give this game much love. My personal opinion, LONG LIVE THE SOVIET UNION.

I have not even GOTTEN to the point of doing actually important stuff but my god do I love just BUILDING random stuff. 10/10 game, music is good, gameplay is solid, watching your stuff get built is fun, and if its done and watching it work is another sort of happieness that I didnt know I needed

Very disapointed . The tutorial is nowhere near to be enough to play and I wont start watching youtube videos on how to play . The graphics are discusting and overall the game is no great

Could have been great.

My biggest pet peeve is the way public transport works. Citizens won't switch between different lines. They will only go from A to B so you need countless direct line to be efficient. This is such an oversight that the game is basically unplayable after a while.

how does a basketball field catch fire? xD
spent like 5 hours just on the tutorials.
10/10 game.

The answer you're looking for is: yes.

I have not played a game that has hooked me in like this.
It has a balance of soviet-esque humour, real vehicles, the winter/survival (Frostpunky) and Factorio style production mechanics that are just perfect.

Realistic mode also allows you to truly build your city, not just "click > spend money > *boom* built structure". You have to bring in the resources to lay down the road, the foundation, the framing of the structure and finally clad it, it's really nice and satisfying when building up a city from scratch.

...and Thank god you can take out loans like in OpenTTD or I'd be starting again lol