Rise of Industry

Rise of Industry is a bird's eye view sandbox business-management game where you set up resource extraction and supply lines to sell goods to market. I only played for a few hours before I got bored and stopped.

THE GOOD:

• It has cute block graphics.

THE BAD:

• The tutorial was a giant info dump that felt like drinking from a fire hose.
• In spite of the apparent complexity implied by the tutorial, the gameplay seems to be mostly comprised of placing buildings and setting up logistics connections between them. Money then starts coming in.
• Maybe it's just me, but making logistics connections between buildings feels like half a game. Where is the rest of the game? By itself, this feels like boring work rather than fun.
• You can enable in-game help for your first time playing, and this is actually a better tutorial than the official tutorial since it lets you learn bit-by-bit as you play. However, done back-to-back with the tutorial it feels repetitive.
• There are competing businesses, but you don't seem to interact with them at all—except possibly in competition for land deeds and by buying out their shares?

THE UGLY:

• Investigating resources and locations in the game opens a popup, which you have to manually close. I found it intrusive and annoying to deal with.
• I didn't spot any bugs during my short play-through, although I didn't appreciate how placing a warehouse automatically overrode all the logistics connections I'd carefully created.