Set in an alternate history where Europe is fragmented after WW1, Kaiserpunk blends city-building and grand strategy where players have to rebuild a devastated city while defending it from foreign attacks.
Kaiserpunk Is Now Available on Steam
Kaiserpunk is what you get when you combine Cities Skylines with a WW1 grand strategy game. Developed by Overseer, the game is set in an alternative history where Europe is fractured into small city-states following the First World War. The game tasks the player with rebuilding a destroyed city and making it prosper again, all while protecting it from foreign attacks.
When you boot up Kaiserpunk, you take control of a group of surviving soldiers who return to their homeland only to discover it has been completely devastated. You will have to revitalize your city’s economy and even the most basic of needs that your citizens have will require a multi-stage operation.
On top of that, Kaiserpunk isn’t just a city builder because it is also a strategy game. It won’t be too long before some of the other small states in the fractured post-WW1 Europe will attack you and you will have to defend everything you’ve built.
What’s the Building Like?
The game’s building mechanics can feel somewhat overwhelming at first. Even the most basic things, such as producing food, will require you to build multiple buildings. For instance, to ensure your products are properly distributed to the population, they must first pass through a distribution depot.
The same level of multi-faceted building is present in the infrastructure you must create. Water and power require a lot of different buildings as everything has to be connected. Fortunately, making roads is relatively easy as you just have to move your cursor in the direction that you want your path to go. It will then automatically navigate around buildings, eliminating the need to stop and start.
It doesn’t take a lot of time before your city starts looking rather dense and lively. Then again, that liveliness comes more from the many factories that bulge out tons of smoke. The somewhat steampunk aesthetic of the buildings really things together to create an early 20th-century industrial revolution feel to everything.
But You have to Defend Your City
Here’s the other key feature of Kaiserpunk – it won’t be long before other small states will want to capture your capital city. At this point, the game shifts from a city-building game to something more akin to a grand strategy game, like Europa Universalis or Hearts of iron IV. You leave the main screen and switch to a world map, where your armies are represented by individual soldiers positioned along country borders. Your opponents will steadily advance towards you, and your task is to push back by optimizing your military production to build stronger guns, ships, and planes, gradually moving your “pieces” across the map.
Of course, you can also go into the attack. The more territory your armies conquer, the more cash and raw materials you gain, which you can use to enhance and expand your manufacturing base. Kaiserpunk is a large, ambitious game, but after about an hour, its core systems become clear, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can become an effective leader.
Conclusions
Kaiserpunk combines two types of games, a city builder and a grand strategy, quite well. Its setting is something we don’t often see and the aesthetics of the game are quite charming. There’s still some work to be done on the game, especially regarding some of its interface. However, the core gameplay is pretty good and with a few extra patches, things will be ironed out.
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