Titanium industry review: a construction tool that strangely combines less than the sum of its parts

I imagine Industries of Titan started as an ambitious concept. Combination of factory/logistics layout model, integrated into one city ​​buildercombined with the real-time virtual reality (RTS) genre, all wrapped up in an old-fashioned satire that encourages you to be the scariest evil hypercapitalist you can be.

All of those parts are present, and as a bonus, it’s absolutely gorgeous, with powerful voice acting and a distinctive soundtrack that will haunt me for weeks. Most of its parts are manufactured to a high standard, sadly its final design does not work at all.

Of all things, IOT reminds me of Fragile loyalty. You are the ‘founder’, sent to a Titan that has been colonized and abandoned to build a new city by order of the Council. You are the ‘founder’, sent to a Titan that has been colonized and abandoned to build a new city by order of the Council. First, by salvaging its ruined buildings for minerals and isotopes, then mining surface sediments, all of which return to your building resources. Oddly enough, you never combine two resources to create a third resource, you can only upgrade minerals through the hierarchy. Higher tier resources will be more powerful, meaning that, for example, a build site will accept 100 raw minerals or four higher tier units. It’s a bit weird, but it mostly works.

But every building other than the original one (a “factory”, i.e. an empty room) is specialized to produce one thing, with no interior. As soon as you have enough money to unlock these, you will flatten every “factory” except the one that is condensing your resources and never look inside again. The internals have a very different look (worse) and feel like a vestige of an earlier design that wasn’t properly removed.

Money, too, is important at first. Citizens are purchased from passing ships with “influence” constantly being regenerated in a strange randomization system. You give them free housing and they make money by viewing ads, somehow, your only source of income. If it’s meant to be satirical then it’s a complete failure, as it makes no sense on any level and doesn’t fit what you’re doing. That’s another weird thing: it’s not clear what industry this is really about. If it’s a huge, all-consuming monopoly, that’s fine, but you don’t provide any services or export anything.

Citizens have no need but to reduce pollution, which is easy because they never have to go anywhere. There’s no reason to pay attention to them other than to replace them when they die. They never complain or rebel and their sole purpose is to generate money and get converted into ‘Employees’ doing actual work. This means pushing them into a machine that turns them into cyborgs, but they did only now do you pay them? What?

This is the only truly evil thing you do. It has no teeth and is disconnected from anything else. Rebels attack periodically from distant bases, but they can also be aliens or zombies for all the interactions you have. “We know you’re taking money from the council,” one said during their first broadcast. “I’m not damned! I wish I was!” was my immediate thought. IN tropical region, every rebel was once a citizen protesting your politics. On Titan, you’re supposed to be the bad guy but never feel guilty or have any relationship with anyone. It is never clear why you can facilitate a thousand citizens generating wages for several hundred lobe workers instead of just hiring citizens.

Once you’ve earned enough, you can unlock some types of buildings, but after that it doesn’t matter anymore. All your other resources slowly spread across the map and you find yourself wondering why you’re really here. The obvious assumption is to wipe out the rebels and rival founders, right? Corporate rivalry turned into an informal war? Yes, type. Build a shipyard (each can only support two ships) and a laboratory to better research hulls and equipment. Shipbuilding itself becomes a chore, when you suddenly, hours later, go back to installing components inside the building. You design the layout of each ship, place parts on oddly shaped grids, then maneuver it with idle staff.

Vessels can fight rebels and other rival ships, you can even view their internals to see crews scurry, FTL style, firearms maneuvering and firefighting as you optionally target Target specific enemy components. It looks great, but it makes absolutely no sense because whoever’s ship has the most HP wins, very slow, not moving. Even at triple speed, everything takes time to shoot down. Incredibly, you can’t even control multiple ships at once. In the year 2023! Controlling a fleet becomes another chore that undermines the beautiful combat effects and the fun way that enemy buildings deal collateral damage and spread fire to each other (something that the workers must be asked to extinguish manually. Christ).

Let’s say you wipe out all threats. Well, you didn’t win. You win by gaining victory points, which are granted when meeting apparently random objectives like “have 70 influence” or “build 12 air purifiers”. They run counter to design, as they require many small buildings instead of those that are effectively upgraded. I have won every level by frustratingly building dozens of excess truck depots or incinerators anywhere just to get through it. You also have to build logistics to support them. Building things you don’t want or need is incredibly hard work.

If it’s a satire about goal-setting culture, it fails because it’s never clear who the Council is or what they want. They never ask for anything, money is irrelevant, your opponents are so static they probably don’t exist, and I eliminated its trivial character transmission within a day because they feel like switching to another game.

That is the fundamental problem with Industries of Titan. It’s a beautifully animated and scoring game with the core of a great city builder/slow-paced RTS, and the core of a management game full of old-fashioned satire and unscrupulous characters. German cheerful, but not sinewy. Everything floats in a kind of cool but unsatisfying pile up. I can’t complain about the glitches of the UI, the long wait times, and the predictability of every map (reducing visual value, which makes it probably the best-looking strategy game out there). ever since). But none of that undermines it more severely than the nagging feeling that it is much less than the sum of its parts.