Kaiserpunk has an immediately interesting premise: rebuilding society from the ashes of an alternate timeline World War I that raged so much longer and more mercilessly that it left the survivors in a post-apocalyptic struggle for survival. When it leans into being a city builder with a roaring 20s flair, that scenario can really shine. But the diet grand strategy game playing out on its dissonant strategic map, as well as a host of technical issues that I could maybe forgive if this were an Early Access launch instead of the full thing, make me wish I’d perished in 1916.
Each game of Kaiserpunk begins with laying out a few ramshackle houses and modest farms on one of its varied but fairly flat maps based on real-world locations, which range from Seattle, Washington to Sydney, Australia. It’s neat that the lower-tier buildings look like they were made from salvaged materials, often sporting brand names of forgotten, pre-war businesses. Each lot is a quaint and stylish little diorama, and I enjoyed watching my rough-and-tumble laborers go about their days.
This continues up the social ladder as you keep adding more specialized and higher-paid citizens, with the most privileged residences creating almost idyllic early 20th Century neighborhoods that could make me forget the world fell apart for but a moment. This sense of transforming the ruined landscape into a place worth living in again is satisfying, and there’s a deep and decently entertaining web of production chains underneath it all, too.
The series Kaiserpunk is most comparable to is Anno, in that the goal is to work your way up from vegetable gardens to eventually manufacturing your own televisions and radios, supporting a growing middle and upper class with increasingly lavish and specific desires that must be maintained. Especially at smaller scales, I found a good amount of enjoyment in this urban planning. And it’s pretty cool that when I shape my society through the different settlement tiers by selecting policies, my main government building changes to reflect my values.
Kaiserpunk seems to have no idea what scale it wants to tell stories on.
But while there are dozens of resources and all kinds of unlockable buildings – from schools to clinics – to better the lives of my people, those same systems fall flat in other ways that make the world less believable. Nobody minds living next to a steel mill, for example – not even the wealthiest citizens. Everyone has a desire for health and education, but this is simply dealt with by plopping public service buildings. The smog from factories never causes health to decline, from what I could tell. This encourages building hodgepodge settlements that don’t really look like or develop in the way real cities do.
The whole thing comes apart even more when you get out onto the strategic map. For one thing, Kaiserpunk seems to have no idea what scale it wants to tell stories on. In my city, I’m concerned with whether my 200 machinists have enough gramophones to fulfill their luxury needs. But then on the strategic map, “Central Europe” is a single, indivisible political region. It’s very similar to the map from the board game Risk. This really does not mesh at all.
If they wanted to have a strategic layer, they should have gone for something much more modest. A lot of the theming is already very British, so why not zoom in and spend just as much time on a post-apocalyptic UK? Why would these devastated city-states rising from the ashes be out trying to conquer the world like it’s Hearts of Iron?
And the strategic systems don’t do much for me either. For one thing, the turn-based battle animations are comical, almost slapstick, and I don’t feel like that was intentional. The mechanics are complex but cumbersome, and don’t provide a lot of information after the fact on why you won or lost. Things like terrain type and your ability to supply your armies can eventually change the course of a war, but it’s all kind of half-baked and impenetrable.
The big picture comes across like there was a strong idea for an interwar city builder that then had a second, half-finished game nailed onto it. You could lose this whole world map layer and I honestly think it would be a better experience. Maybe you could abstract the defense industry, which eventually has you building your own tanks and artillery, as something you have to do to secure your borders rather than worrying about conquest. There are diplomatic and scientific victory paths if you don’t want to focus on guns and bombs, but you can’t really ignore the world map if you want to be successful at either of them.
For what’s supposed to be a finished product, the polish simply isn’t here.
The AI on the default Normal difficulty setting is fairly ruthless, too. As a new player, I felt like they were always way ahead of me by the time I ran into them, which is discouraging. When I’m playing a city builder, I don’t want my life to be completely without struggle. But since I’m getting plenty of that trying to provide for my people anyway, the idea that I can be vastly outpaced by the AI if I don’t develop my industries as quickly and efficiently as possible seems excessive. It’s not tuned well, especially when you’re first learning the ropes.
And that’s all before we even get to the technical issues. Like I said, if this were an Early Access game, I might cut it a little more slack. But for what’s supposed to be a finished product, the polish simply isn’t here. There’s a lot of little technical things that come across as sloppy, like the fact that the resource counters on the strategic map don’t update in real time when the clock is going. You have to close the map and open it again.
You can’t click on different columns to sort the resource screen, which is very frustrating given how many of them there are. The tooltip for population needs fulfillment doesn’t provide enough information, so I frequently found myself having to tediously go around clicking on individual houses to figure out what people wanted more of like I was doing a door-to-door survey.
The economy balance can be quite odd at the higher levels too, where simply building a single high-rise full of specialists will print money even if they’re unhappy, but then trying to provide for their needs ends up being more expensive overall. It’s supposed to be the other way around, where happier citizens pay more taxes. But the balance doesn’t always swing that way.
Most of all, though, it’s pretty buggy. All the way up until the day before this review, I was running into multiple issues with saves suddenly deciding not to load after I’d played a given city for a long time. I’m glad this seems to have gotten a last minute fix, but that’s the ultimate vibe killer when you’ve put more than 25 hours into a run. At one point, when I hadn’t met any other factions yet, I got a notification that “the enemy” had launched a firebombing campaign on my city that resulted in more than a dozen buildings randomly bursting into flames. Who did this, exactly? Some raiders hiding out in a canyon down the road?
