Rise of Industry

I have a hard time recommending this game. While I will admit that the graphics are cute and the fundamental game play can be very fun, I can only admit that is the case for the first few hours. Let me preface any negatives with the understanding that the creators of this game clearly had love for it, that much is certainly clear, they made a game that they liked. However, it feels like they completely gave up on it after they created it, and while some add ons like the stock market was great and added to the gameplay, it didn't fundamentally change anything about the game to make it fun in the long term. Lets tackle the worst offenses this game has. The immediate is that it is overly complex and expects you to micromanage everything. This game lacks several quality of life features that many other games in the genre has, such as automation of many of the tasks. When you begin a game, you expect to be micromanaging tasks because it is easy to do, but as your business empire expands, you will still need to be doing all of that. There are features in the game such as warehouses that make this easier, but it never makes it fun or simpler. Additionally, the game has a pretty terrible tutorial. Where in many tycoon games, or city type strategy games like this, they'll let you play the tutorial yourself and either let it transition to the main game or jump across multiple skips of a main game to show you how to handle everything at each stage and how to take advantage of something in the midgame you would never know about otherwise, this game doesn't do that. This game shows you how to place buildings (and doesn't let you deviate from that AT ALL, it MUST go in the exact place they want it exactly how they want it) but it also ends almost immediately and doesn't show you much other than that. Interestingly, the game DOES have an in-game tutorial in their "campaign" (which is essentially just sandbox mode, another mode you can play), I cannot rank it because it bugged out twice and wouldn't let me progress in either of the games I tried playing, you can luckily turn it off because the in-game tutorial also locks fundamental game play features behind it. Once I got past that, I actually did have a lot of fun with it for a few hours. Setting up supply lanes, expanding my tech tree to allow for more complex things to be made, and even completely buying up one of my competitors on the stock market and inheriting their mess of a company. However, what I quickly learned was that everything I experienced in my first few hours was just the entire game. It didn't get any more interesting or complex, you could aim for the end game "proto-types" but there is little point to doing so. Setting up a chicken farm and selling stuff from that is just as complex as setting up the production of a car, except the car is just more tedious due to the micromanaging. There is a reason on 2% of players have "beaten" the game by creating the car prototype, it is just boring and not worth it to do so. Is it really worth trying to manually set up 15 different supply lines just so you can make 10 million dollars a month compared to 5? I wouldn't say it is. There is even a very sad story if you look into it behind this game. The developers, Dapper Penguin, and their lead "Alex", tried really hard to provide for their studio and be successes. However, because they didn't put more effort into this game after release and instead jumped into making another over promised and overly complex game, they saw middling reviews and a quick dry up in sales, something that started to kill their studio. My heart broke when I read that Alex took a mortgage out on his house to keep the studio afloat and then still had to sell Rise of Industry's entire IP to Kasedo games, their publisher, just to try and release a new game that never happened. On top of that, he sold the IP for less than $100,000 dollars and doesn't see a penny of it anymore. The studio still closed and the game is not getting further updates. This is a heartbreaking story, and there is more too it, but a sad story around the game doesn't change the feelings I have about how it plays. Ultimately, this isn't a BAD game, it is just a mid one. It gets old pretty fast, unless you are super into making supply lines all by yourself. If you love tycoon/capitalism games, and this seems up your alley, then get it on a deep sale and I can recommend it. Otherwise, I would say to avoid this one.

Figured I'd write a review since a lot of people are gonna get it from EGS for free this week and look for reviews here. It's a solid OTTD variant, but at the end of the day pretty shallow. I got my 22.4 hours out of it (for the campaign) and enjoyed them, but probably won't install it again.

Reading the negative reviews, I feel like people went into this game expecting a prettier, more modern OpenTTD when RoI is 100% not that. The game is completely different in how it works and how it plays. The only similarity between OpenTTD and RoI, apart from the fact that they are both transport simulators, is that they both require extensive effort to learn how to play the game and play well. Balancing supply chains and advancing your crafting capabilities all while staving off competition is actually quite fun and rewarding in a different way than OpenTTD generally feels. The reality of RoI is that it is really an automation game disguised as a transport tycoon wannabe, and that has clearly thrown some other players for a loop. If you don't want to put the time in to actually learn how to play the game, RoI is likely not for you. If you like games like OpenTTD, Factorio, Satisfactory, or ECO and you enjoy reading wikis for fun, then RoI might be of interest to you. The game is beautiful and the gameplay is engaging albeit a bit repetitive. Certainly an interesting title for the right kind of player.

Alex - The real developer got basically scammed with bad contract from publisher and eventually had to sell the IP for pennies. Also, the game is just boring and mediocre, so can't recommend in any level.

This is the best game ever, especially for mind exercise. I've played over 1800 hours so far. I really believe this game will improve your memory. I began playing keeping a spiral notebook record of each region I owned keeping notations on all products produced in individual regions (what product they were). If you have played the game you know about the multitudes of products available to produce and sell. After playing over and over several times I began to remember what products were where and what the production formula was to produce each product. Now at 1800 plus hours the only notations I keep in a notebook are what the towns warehouse number is for each region. I plant a warehouse asap for every region regardless of whether I own the permit for the region or not. The warehouse has the tiles selected to encompass all of a town and their shops. I then plant a airport and only ship via air to the town encompassing warehouses. The products are automatically sold to the shops. Ask me questions maybe i can answer some!!!!!

The UI completely lack the necessary information necessary to make a business run. Additionally, the tools that the game gives you to manage your business range from poorly designed (profit percentages displayed in shops) to downright harmful to your profit margins (warehouses, delivery trucks/trains). If you're going to buy it, read online reviews first.

­

This game is fun, until it isn’t. If there was a neither good, nor bad recommendation option, I would choose that. It has some mindless fun, until you have to start troubleshooting. I give it more of a thumbs down because of the lack of AI competitors and the warehouse logistics breaking. The AI is just there to steal auctions away from you and make it more difficult to buy adjacent land. They do not contribute anything else. I would recommend playing without them. The warehouse logistics is what ultimately frustrates you to the point of uninstalling the game. The warehouse does not ship by a round-robin approach. I had a warehouse capable of receiving enough water to dispense to 4 farms each month. Instead of supplying all 4 farms equally, it overloads 2 of them while the other 2 starve. Other times, the warehouse just stops shipping on routes until you notice the overflow. You have to delete the route and recreate it to get it all working again. Then you start creating plans to bypass the warehouse logic, and deliver directly from source to consumer. Only to find out the source building can also suffer from the same do not deliver bug. Very frustrating.