Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic

A fussy and demanding, but utterly singular and impossibly absorbing planning and logistical sim that other city builders can barely hope to match.

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic has everything it takes to spark its own revolution in the city-building and management simulation genre. With the humility of a proletarian who has spent years perfecting their craft, the title achieves the feat of elevating the style to a new level of management complexity, capable of intimidating even the most seasoned players, which unfortunately makes it considerably inaccessible to a broader audience. After all, building a Soviet paradise has never been easy, but it is possible.

One of the best urban strategies comes from Slovakia, and in addition to its complexity, it also impresses with its setting in the period of socialism. This leitmotif will not bother you, even if this time does not mean anything to you, and when you have experienced it yourself for at least a moment, it will be all the more interesting for you.

"Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic" now offers a fully comprehensive overall package and in my opinion is one of, if not the strongest city builder game out there. The new DLC maps round off this overall package and make the game even more fun to play. For the test of the full release version, I immediately lost myself in the game again and have since spent another 30 hours in it, bumping my total playtime up to over 90 hours.

Workers & Resources is a terrific builder. Very complicated, quite ugly, with a cluttered UI and an extremely complex network of mechanics and connections, that looks like something from a fever dream. But it drags you in and offers lots of saisfaction when something finally goes right.

Workers and Resources: the Soviet Republic is certainly a great representative of builder strategies. It offers excellent complexity and replayability. It oozes the right atmosphere, both graphically and sonically. The free-play mode offers plenty of options for different settings, including a realistic mode. However, the complexity can also be frustrating, as the game can't always explain the workings of certain chains correctly, for example, in production, even though it includes information tables where the mechanics are described.