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In Cities Skylines 2, you start with a promising new world – a lush, empty peninsula where everything is possible. In Frostpunk 2, it’s the opposite. The environment has been destroyed and even the simplest resources are scarce. Kaiserpunk, an ambitious new strategy game that has finally just arrived on Steam, takes place somewhere in the middle. This is an alternative history where the end of WW1 has fractured the entirety of Europe into tiny, dysfunctional city states. You can still dream big and build even bigger, but the existential threat of being invaded and conquered looms large. Mixing grand strategy with detailed production-line creation, this one has promise.
When you start Kaiserpunk, you’re the commander of a depleted, ragtag bunch of surviving soldiers, who return to their home country to find that it’s been totally destroyed. It’s a harsh world and nothing comes easy. In a lot of city-building and strategy games, if you want to harvest a resource, it’s as simple as buying a single building. In Kaiserpunk, producing even fundamentals like vegetables and bread requires a multi-stage operation.
Thankfully, although the systems are complex, the building mechanics are intuitive and clear. For example, in order for any of your products to be properly distributed to the population, they need to go through a distribution depot. It sounds like it could be fussy and fiddly, but there’s an elegant on-screen language whereby every time you create a new building, the blueprint is surrounded by a circular radius. So long as it overlaps with the depot’s radius, the two will be connected.
It’s the same with your water and power grids, and the road-building is very smart. Everything needs to be linked, but painting roads is swift – as long as you move your cursor in the direction that you want your path to go, it will automatically weave around buildings, so you don’t have to stop and start. Within the first 30 minutes, your first city begins to look incredibly dense.
Since everything requires multiple buildings and connected production lines, when you step back and zoom out, your settlements in Kaiserpunk have this wonderful, smoggy, dystopian look, a kind of grotesque of the Industrial Revolution where workers’ houses and giant factories are all pushed together. It’s perfect for the pseudo-steampunk aesthetic, and drives home that gruelling, early-20th-century ardor.
But there’s another half of Kaiserpunk. Eventually, one of the other burgeoning little empires will attack you, and try to capture your capital city. This is when Kaiserpunk starts to feel less like a city-building game, and more like a grand strategy game on the scale of Europa Universalis or Crusader Kings. You exit the main screen and go to a complete map of the world. Your armies are represented by single soldiers, standing on the outlines of various countries. Your rivals will gradually march towards you. Your job is to fight back, optimizing your military production to create better guns, ships, and planes to slowly move your ‘pieces’ across the map.
Each half feeds into the other. The better you build your main cities, and the more resources and products you provide, the more powerful your armies become. And the more territory your armies capture, the more cash and raw materials you have at your disposal to improve and expand your manufacturing base. Kaiserpunk is a big, ambitious game, but after maybe an hour, its core systems make perfect sense, and you’ll be surprised at how effective a leader you can become in just a short time.
There’s definitely room for improvement. Kaisperunk’s menus and interface look very basic, and the combat on the world map especially feels under-developed – if this were an early-access release, it would be perfectly standard, but Kaiserpunk has just hit 1.0.
Nevertheless, if developer Overseer sticks with Kaiserpunk, releases some patches and updates, and keeps building on it for the next few months – or beyond – the majority of its biggest issues can almost certainly be fixed. As it stands, it’s a good mix of strategy genres with a strong, distinctive visual style. There are some problems here, but Kaiserpunk is trying to do something different to a lot of its genre contemporaries, so that’s to be expected.
If you want to try it out, Kaiserpunk is on Steam now. You can get it with an introductory 10% discount, meaning you’ll pay $26.99 / £22.49. Just head here.
Otherwise, try some of the best RTS games, or maybe the best 4X games available today.
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