Rise of Industry 2 is an industry management game – like if you just zoned your whole city in Cities: Skylines for industry and kicked residential and commercial to the kerb. You’ll be focusing on building infrastructure to harvest, process, and ship resources out and your only real interaction with the nearby town is accepting (or refusing) grants or other support and investing to increase the available workforce. It does all of this very well, and yet it manages to be an underwhelming experience simply because…that’s all there is here.
There’s a handy tutorial to guide you through the initial setup for your business, focusing on plastic in this case. Without this tutorial I would have been completely lost as there is a lot of stuff involved here that you might not have anticipated. Obviously you need your lots to have power and probably water, you need relevant shipping and storage facilities, you need waste facilities, the main office building for a lot, and whatever production or harvesting building is relevant. You place all these in a meticulous layout that is hopefully pleasing to your eye because it’ll be there forever, and now you’re harvesting oil! You can sell some of that crude oil by setting up a contract and arranging deliveries, but if you actually want a profit in this riff on the 1980s, you’ll want to process it into plastic.
So now you need a facility to process oil into plastic. This facility needs another lot with power and water, relevant shipping and storage facilities, waste, facilities, main office, and the factory that does the actual processing. Now you’re making plastic! And you can sell this, but you’re better off processing it into an end product like – video cassettes for example. This needs another lot, with power and water, relevant shipping and storage… Do you see the problem here? It’s repetition to an extreme degree. That’s realistic, certainly, but it makes for a dull game.
There is a hell of a lot of detail in the systems of Rise of Industry 2, building your business up can feel satisfying, from picking a resource to start with all the way through to its logical end, but once you have built one lot, all you can do is build another one. Sure you can do a bit of networking, but it’s not like you go and actually play a golf mini-game while hobnobbing with other CEOs and politicians, you just select buttons on a menu and a number to track your relationship with this person and company goes up. The worst part is that, if you do immediately build another lot, you’re probably going to haemorrhage money and go bankrupt. Big profits in big business happen on big timescales, so you can either build your lots, establish their profits and wait until you’ve accrued funds for your rainy day fund, or you can race to build another as quickly as possible, lose too much money and go bankrupt.
It’s like there isn’t quite enough game here, that there’s something missing to keep you busy whilst your business actually makes the money it’s there to make. When you finish developing an area of your city in Cities: Skylines, you can move somewhere else whilst it does its thing, focus on something else that needs your attention. In Rise of Industry 2, you are laser focused on your business and there’s nowhere else to go to keep busy whilst your money slowly rises. It’s a real shame as well, because there is a tonne of depth here mechanically and the actual building of your business and setting up and fulfilling contracts is enjoyable, it just doesn’t feel rewarding after the fact.
There are also a few issues, such as certain problems in your supply chain not always being explained through the UI, leaving you to comb through the fine details of your operation to find the fault, but I suppose that’s part of business anyway. It also unreservedly backs big business in what seemed like it could be a satirical take. You can choose to pollute as little as possible, or you can just use PR to make the consequences go away, and it doesn’t seem to matter either way provided you do one or the other. Maybe there are longer term consequences for the latter that I haven’t seen, because I can only sit and watch a number go up slowly before thinking there must be something I can do to make it go up slightly quicker…and then, following a series of poor decisions, I go bankrupt.