Industries of Titan is a visually pleasing game built on a broken core system. The whole game seems centered around the idea of you building and customizing Factory buildings. You place one down on the map, then "enter" them to be present with a grid space where you can construct modules of various functions. Resource refineries, fuel generation, living spaces, storage, etc. You place them like Tetris pieces, looking for the most optimal layout.

All sounds good yeah? Well there's a problem. The game IMMEDIATELY provides you the option to replace this mini-game with purpose-built buildings that do exactly what the modules do. Did you make a custom 3-story factory with efficiently laid out citizen housing and working spaces? Doesn't matter, the game gives you Offices and Apartments. These buildings do exactly what the modules do just as efficiently with the added advantage of not requiring you to enter the buildings and place modules. This is true for every module in the game with the exception of mineral refinement. The game appears to go out of it's way to sabotage it's primary gameplay loop.

Without the factory mini-game, you're essentially just playing a city-builder with extremely minimal building options. I'm talking 10ish core buildings. You make minimal interesting decisions as a result and the game quickly becomes repetitive. There's just nothing here. Citizens have almost no requirements so no need to worry besides dropping in a hospital and keep them away from industry, which is easy because they only work in Offices. Logistics is basically "If it's not within walking distance just connect a road" and storage is a joke because there's 3 resources (trash, minerals, and isotopes).

Judging by what I've read from backers, the original intention was to lean hard into factories as mini Factorio-esque spaces for a variety of things that would then tie back into your standard needs system. Food, entertainments, etc. This clearly was abandoned, but the hole where all these parts would go are still very apparent.

Long/short: Hold off on getting it and hope the devs expand the factory mechanics so there's actually something to do in the game.

My first impression of the game:

The beginning is a bit confusing. You have different management levels:

1. Production
- Collect raw materials (initially from ruins, later in mines)
- Collect artifacts (also from ruins)
- Produce fuel and electricity
- manage garbage (a lot)

2. Citizens and workers
- Buy and house citizens
- Earn money from citizens watching advertisements
- convert some citizens into 24/7 workers (who then stop watching ads)

3. Build on two different levels
- Inside buildings on a square grid (reminiscent of Tetris blocks :D )
All equipment, storage, accommodation, etc. are built there.
- In the city view you build square buildings
- You can enlarge your building area by buying quadrants from the "Council" (with reputation points)

4. Defend your city
- Build guns (of course again requires a lot of energy and raw materials)
- later with your own ships

As I said, that's my first impression after 3 hours. The tutorial consists of tips on what to do to build your first buildings and systems. However, you have to think along with it, otherwise you quickly get stuck because you don't immediately understand what is missing again ... So always keep an eye on your raw materials, workforce and credits. I am on the first attempt after about 3 hours. Got stuck because I ran out of money. A tutorial where these first steps would be made easier, e.g. with more start-up capital and resources, that would be an advantage for beginners.

Metals and isotopes are available as resources. As residents there are citizens and workers. There are artefacts, money and influence points as currencies. Energy is produced by fuel and then by converting it into electricity. You have to decide again and again how much of your citizens should generate money or have to be converted into workers. You also have to decide every time whether you want to get raw materials out of ruins or artefacts, because you can't do both at the same time. So not that easy for the beginner. But it excites me very much to make a new attempt tomorrow!

So far there have been no crashes, it runs smoothly, even on my 8 year old PC.

I like the game, so thumbs up!

Disappointingly shallow. For a game about industry, you don't do any industry...

You can't even set up any sort of resource pipeline. They make you build a modular refinery, but... they all need the same modules (bar the one input, which could just have been a toggle). Devs talked about adding factorio-style automation at some point but it never materialized. Why exactly are they making me build this modular refinery, then? Just make it a huge building. The layout-puzzling is not really innovative or fun enough for me to care about the 3-4 tiles of shifting I can do. Especially since later on I'll just plop down the building-version of this device.

It's very disappointing that there's a lot of mechanics, but none of them really provide depth. It appears the devs decided that they needed to focus on combat and rivals instead. Well, combat's also bad. Ever played Anno? It's Anno-style combat, but you only produce 2 resources ever.

The game's certainly very pretty.

In all, a decent game but doesn't really a depth of gameplay.

This game has a lot of potential, but it's just not there yet to be a good city builder or RTS (or both).

I started playing the game and found it engaging and challenging. Figuring out the correct build order, the importance of processing, taking your time and scaling up when you're ready for it similar to Tropico. In Tropico and IoT, fast expansion = death. When you have to explore, build, tech up, handle waste and pollution, and fight the frequent rebel assaults and also take their bases, it's a great game. The big problem is that once you wipe out the rebels, the game becomes a boring slog to achieve arbitrary corporate goals for victory.

You don't actually win by beating the rebels, you do it by achieving all 3 or 4 goals for either military, political, or economic dominance. Sounds cool....however, the goals are unnecessarily demanding. For example, one of the military goals is to have 11 ships. I beat all of the rebels with 4 active ships....why would I build another 7? Another one is to have like 11,000 map tiles. When I defeated the rebels and had a great economy and production system with like 100 employees and 250 citizens, I controlled like 150 tiles. Why tf would I need to expand and dominate an empty map. Expansion is slow and expensive - you have to build a satellite HQ at the edge of your territory, make sure it's powered, rinse and repeat. The expansion HQ gives you control over like 10 more tiles. Taking half the map would take FOREVER.

To actually, I ended up doing the economic track, because I had already completed one of the requirements (accept 80 migrant ships). Now, that sounds like a good start, but there's an inherent problem with that. You HAVE to bring in migrants throughout the game to succeed. They are the source of your money, small, incremental amounts of more resources, and the talent pool for your workers. You need migrant citizens to make workers. More stuff on the map, more ships, and you need more workers. So just playing the game requires you to frequently bring in migrant ships.

The other economic goals were much more of a slog. Having 400 employed citizens. I was making like 8K a turn with like 180 citizens....the rebels are gone; why do I need more citizens? It's arbitrary growth for growth's sake, and it's boring. The final economic goal that I needed was having 65 connected buildings on the map. For those who don't know, you can connect two adjacent buildings of the same type to make one big building with more internal building space or to increase productivity. That's a great idea! However, to get this victory condition, I just started building empty factories all over my territory, connecting them, and building nothing in them. It's like I was building Detroit after the auto industry left, just miles of vacant industrial space. So the second half of the game post-rebels was just taking space to build empty buildings and connect them.

This game is an interesting concept, and there's definitely something here. It just needs more content and refinement.

A couple of minor improvements:
- You can't overwrite a manual save file; you have to save new separate save files every time you save. Why? Games have been doing that for 30 years. Why is this the ONLY game I've played in my memory that won't let you do that.
- Ship combat needs improvement. All of your ships can target the same ground building and attack it simultaneously, but ships can only fight head-to-head. The game won't let you have three ships attack a single enemy...why? That removes most of the thinking of an RTS fight.
- The ship crew are bugged. The closest ship combat comparison to this system is FTL. Weapons damage the hull and subsystems, and your crew can repair damaged systems to get back into the fight or escape. However, in most battles, I would zoom into the ship's interior and see half the crew or more just standing around doing nothing or running in place. Their ship and systems are burning all around them and like 2 out of 8 are actually repairing things. Unlike FTL, I can't order them to do anything, so I'm stuck just watching most of the crew do nothing like the world burns around them. Please fix it.

I want to love this game, but it's just not there yet.

Great music and good art.
But the gameplay is disappointingly boring.
It's not a city builder proper, there's too little city design.
It isn't a production chain planner, there isn't much to produce.
It's not much of a tower defense or a 4x.
It does not give sufficient immersion, people live extremely basic lives in this game.
It's sad that during all this time in Early Access, the gameplay was not reworked.

I wish there was more options for reviews. I do like the aesthetics and its a very promising game. But at the current version at release on steam, its a wait to buy for me.

But at this point in time, the game isn't worth thirty dollars. You can see everything and build everything in around 3 hours of game play. Money is pointless at the moment. You use it to unlock things but after they're all unlocked it just piles up, so why build more residential and office buildings? You really only need one or two level 2-3 processors for each resource to have all that you need, so why build more of them? I feel like the game is missing its core gameplay mechanic, which should be focusing on making your population happy and defending them from the rebels. At the moment it's just build as much as you can for no reason and hunt rebels.

When they add more to the game, probably around October according to the road map when they add a tech tree, it could be worth it then and especially when they add the needs mechanics to the civilian population.

People are going to complain that its an EA game, so you're really funding the future development of the game, but the price point is where it should be when it fully releases. At the current state I'd say its more of a $15 game, so buy it if it gets on a bigger sale.

Update: From what I understand, half the dev team has been laid off and there won't be any meaningful updates to this game. Do not purchase this game.

As much as I would love to, I cannot recommend this game. For context, I completed the entire campaign (40ish hours). I bought the game when it came out of early access and had not followed its development.

TLDR: Game feels unfinished. More like a 0.8 than a 1.0
+Atmosphere/lore and visual design
+Ship to ship combat is neat
-Plenty of cool mechanics that are half baked
-Lore clearly unfinished
-Enemies are easy to knock out and then its just a tedious slog to complete the victory conditions for each map, not very challenging
-No box select/groups for your fleet of multiple ships

The thing I primarily loved was the atmosphere and lore. If dystopian cyberpunk is your jam then you'll love it on Titan. It felt like I was playing a city builder version of Cloudpunk. The early/mid game was enjoyable, building out my cities, deciding how and when to expand. However, that's where the good ends.

The game play mechanics seem to be all over the place. There is a function where you can place empty buildings and furnish their insides so that whatever role you require is fulfilled. This is pretty neat but once you come up with the most efficient design you end up saving a blueprint and just using that across all your games. As you progress on a given level you will unlock dedicated buildings that fulfill a role (eg an apartment building or a power plant) and the need to place empty buildings and mess with the interior disappears entirely. A very cool mechanic that is irrelevant once you've progressed slightly on a given map. (and sometimes entirely irrelevant since as you progress in the campaign, you can improve your conditions when you start a new map such that you'll have enough money to unlock the dedicated buildings immediately). A cool mechanic that is half baked.

The only thing you require these customizable buildings for is to set up a material refinement chain. The minerals you mine can be refined into higher tiers. A cool resource management mechanic! However there is no thinking involved here. In every case higher tier is always better. Once this is set up you can completely forget about it as it runs in the background. A cool mechanic that is half baked.

The shipbuilding is an extension of customizable buildings. You select an empty hull type and then furnish the interior of the ship with different components. You have to consider power generation and requirements, making sure every tile is accessible for repair as well as making sure important things aren't clustered together so they don't all go down in one shot. This is probably where you can spend the most time in thinking things through and making decisions. Combat plays like FTL where you can pick on the enemy ship where to land each salvo. Perhaps you want to target their crew or their weapons or their energy generator. Super cool and fun but is let down by how and when combat actually happens.

The rebels and rival corporation. The rebels will attack you on a wave based timer system. Doing certain actions (like building defenses) advances the timer by an additional amount. However, the rebels never pose any real threat once you know how to manage them. You fend off the first wave or two with turrets and then once you have your own ships you can send them off to deal with the rebels. It doesn't matter if their base is heavily defended by turrets and ships, all you need to knock them out is a suicide run against their HQ. As long as their HQ is destroyed then they stop attacking you. And if you fail in your first run its no big deal since they don't repair any damage you have done. (There is nothing fancy about attacking a building, its just an HP bar - unlike ships which have the interior I had previously mentioned) Zero challenge.

Similarly, your rival corporation (the other AI on the same map as you) never poses any threat. They never attack you and seem to progress along the victory conditions extremely slowly. Once you've dealt with the rebels you can take your ships and destroy the rival HQ to remove them from the game. Unlike the rebels they do repair (but won't rebuild their HQ) but I never saw more than one ship guarding their territory.

This brings me to my next point of no box select. Most maps I had 2 to 4 ships at once. You have to issues orders to them individually. No box select. No grouping them. There were also times when I wanted to mass build (eg a road) and could not click and drag. Or when I wanted to mass survey/claim tiles and could not box select. You have to do it one tile at a time. Supremely not fun.

Speaking of rivals and rebels, it sucks that there is no real way to interact with them aside from blowing them up. Why can't I bribe the rebels to attack my rival or to not attack me for one wave? Why can't I enter some kind of business deal with my rival?

Once you've destroyed the rebels and your rival the game turns into a long slog to complete whatever the random nonsensical victory conditions are for a given map. Sometimes you need to stockpile large quantities of a resource. Other times you need to own a large number of the same type of building. This one in particular is quite common and quite stupid. Through normal game play you would never end up owning the required number of buildings for these victory conditions. Every time I had to find some empty part of the map and just build a whole bunch of them to meet the victory condition. What is even dumber is that you can connect buildings (cool mechanic where two adjacent buildings of the same type can be combined for a bonus - and is something you always do in normal game play) but this reduces your building count! This victory condition should be reworked by assigning a point value to buildings to take into account the fact that they can be upgraded and connected. This late game stage is boring, un-fun, and mostly just a time sink before you can click the complete level button.

Finally, the lore. I had mentioned previously that it was good - and it is. Lore about the world and your rival businesses is revealed through audio logs that automatically come up over time as you play and through building/item/tile descriptions. However there isn't enough of it. Despite playing 40 hours and beating the campaign I have not unlocked all the audio logs for some reason. There are also various mysteries that are referenced in the game - where is all the gas that covers the surface coming from, what is at the bottom of all these chasms, why has the council banned research into mountains that shouldn't exist, what happened to the previous civilization that lived on Titan? But none of these are ever followed up on. There is no resolution or even exploration into them.

If you made it all the way to the end, thank you for reading. I apologize if I rambled at times - this is the longest review I have ever written. There is so much to this game. This game could be great. I want this game to be great. The bones are there but a lot of work needs to be done before Industries of Titan achieves greatness.

Here is my massage to devs;
You have the best looking solid game with zero mid and end-game targets.
You need to make me feel the imperialism to my bones. Right now, the game can deliver only a taste.
Add deep politics
add rebellion factions
add 40 more buildings
add endless upgrades to the buildings
add an economy
ADD TRADE!! ADD TRADE!!
add exotic goods
add tourism and such
Let me make a mega dystopian city filled with cyberpunk 2077 vibes and depth
add turf wars and endless corporation fight

Awesome game, but needs mod support. Let me explain:

The core game is utterly fantastic IMO. It's got great visuals, great music, and a really interesting concept: What if you could play a factory-manager inside your city builder? The campaign mode is pretty fun the first few times through! They manage to keep the game-play fresh by allowing you to accrue favor to buy campaign-wide buffs, as well as single-scenario augments that completely change how you interact with the world. Maybe your buildings will be super cheap, but will be vulnerable to attack? Maybe your citizens will actually like
polluted buildings, even though they are more susceptible to it? It allows you to play in ways usually impossible, while presenting unique challenges to combat at the same time.

So why is the game mixed (as of v1.0.3)?

Well, if you've read any other reviews, you can tell pretty quickly that, aside from the augments in campaign mode, the game is pretty repetitive. Once you find a strategy that works, it will always work. Also, a lot of the combat/RTS aspects to it feel kind of arbitrary and unnecessary. I hardly ever find myself building ships, and when I do it's usually because of a campaign objective. Heck, I didn't even know there was a rival corporation" faction until I played through my third campaign! Once I found my groove I was literally beating maps so (relatively) quickly that my rivals never even had a chance to threaten me. And, as the icing on the cake, the late-game city-building is laughably easy. There are a limited set of buildings in the game, and they can only upgrade to level 3, so by about 3/4 of the way through a scenario you'll pretty consistently have more resources than you even know what to do with.

So the game's got issues, issues big enough to turn many people away from the game entirely. And to be honest, I don't blame them. However, there is a very, very easy solution to their problems: Mods.

Almost every complaint I see in these reviews could be solved by mods. Not enough buildings? Make more! Combat's too boring? Change it! Gameplay too consistent? Shake it up! It wouldn't even be that hard, at least for certain things. While the core of the game is untouchable (for now), all the building, research, map data, etc. are stored in a format called "XML" (If you've ever messed around with FTL mods, you'll know exactly where I'm going).

To be perfectly honest, the existence of these files are the reason I'm even willing to recommend this game at all, let alone write this long-winded review of it. Even if you don't know anything about coding, XML is super simple, and there are already dozens of examples of code in the files themselves. By editing these, you can add your own research, your own augments, customize the campaign, change the cost/requirements of buildings, basically anything that doesn't need to alter the core gameplay. You do need to be a little careful, because deleting stuff can cause save files to be corrupted, but it is so worth it.

If even this basic level of modding can change the game this much, I can only imagine what the community could come up with given workshop support and/or modding tools.


TLDR; Nice game, but will get old pretty fast. There isn't any modding support (yet), but if you know a little XML you can probably double or triple the game's lifespan. 7/10, would mod again.

These days, a city builder isn’t going to make many waves unless it has some kind of cool catchy feature. Plenty of solid city builders have flown under the radar because they didn’t do anything to stand out. Industries of Titan may just look like an exceptionally stylistic sci-fi city builder, but what makes it unique is on the inside. Literally. You get to build stuff inside of the buildings you create.

(I originally played this on Epic.)
Abbreviated Review: https://youtu.be/VRB5yXgaXbw

Industries of Titan caught my eye a long time ago when it first came to the Epic Store. I eventually played it there not long before its release to Steam because I’m impatient. It has a very recognizable style and aesthetic that I can’t say I’ve seen in many sci-fi city builders. Most of the time, games in this genre that adopt the interplanetary setting have a design that is distinct from typical city builders. One that doesn’t mimic the grid-type cities of their terrestrial brothers. However, Industries of Titan embraces a design that has your creations looking more similar to cities you’d find on Earth. Of course, the similarities are only skin-deep.

Industries of Titan takes advantage of the qualities of Unreal Engine to make some beautiful moments of weather and lighting through the day and night cycles within the hostile environment of Titan. There’s plenty of volumetric lighting that amplifies the heavy implementation of atmospheric effects. It all comes together to give this blocky world that neon smoky cyberpunk feel that is reminiscent of Blade Runner.

I initially wasn’t aware that Industries of Titan gave you the ability to go inside of buildings to build more things. This feature has a great implementation, but one that also sort of fades away as you get further into the city-building process. Initially, your only capabilities are to build hollow husks of buildings called Factories that contain a building grid within them. You have to build your power, fuel collection (to run the power), habitation pods for civilians, and commercial-watching money generators, among a host of other small features in this confined space. The initial part of the game will have you in there as much as you’re outside working toward more resources.

Once you get well established, there are larger exterior buildings that take over the majority of these roles. It takes a significant amount of resources to unlock them though, so you will spend plenty of time managing these interiors. However, there will come a point when everything is unlocked that you only really go inside of the buildings to build one thing – the processors.

Processors work in a kind of minimalistic “Factorio” way in that you transform your collected through machines into better resources. This is essential to build the much more effective bulk of your buildings like power plants and waste furnaces. Yet, once you get a good number of those going, it’s easy to forget about them as well. This leads the game to feel more like a typical city builder rather than the more unique one that it is initially.

There are some other aspects that make Industries of Titan stand out from the crowd. The premise is that you’re a new corporate lackey tasked with heading up this new settlement on this partially terraformed moon. Within this system, you’re going to be receiving influence points that you can spend on getting additional resources and shipments from space – which are your only source for new civilians. Pleasing your boss is an integral part of the experience and can involve building monuments for your overlords to enhance the process.

Along with this, the map has several rebel groups that will try to attack your settlement throughout the game (assuming you’re not in the ‘chill’ game mode). This brings with it an entire subset of gameplay that involves building defensive turrets and flying combat ships to fight against these attackers. You’ll ultimately take the fight to their doorstep to obliterate the hard work of the AI with giant lasers from your floating behemoths. If you click on a ship and go inside while it’s in combat, you can even select and aim your weapons sort of like FTL. It’s not a requirement and I’m not entirely sure if I ever affected the outcome of a battle, but it’s a fun addition nonetheless.

Industries of Titan is a solid experience as it is right now, but you can tell that it still needs some work in its Early Access process. While the game looks stunning and has a competent gameplay loop that can carry a session for hours, it feels like it hasn’t quite settled on what exactly it wants to be. Are they going to push more toward the city building aspect where the failure state is having a population that leaves (or dies) due to your poor design? Is the real-time strategy combat going to continue to be the focal point for whether you “win” a game? Will I ever be able to save floorplan and ship designs so I don’t have to meticulously recreate them every time? Those questions along with my desire to see a lot more variety both for interior and exterior buildings make me want to keep following this development.

As far as whether you should get it – I think the answer is dependent on your appreciation of somewhat slow-paced city builders that try to mix things up. As a fan of the genre, I found a lot to love, but I think the desire for more content and late-game depth might disappoint some people. One thing I can say, however, is that it seems that’s coming to the game before it releases. The roadmap has content coming every month as well as plenty more on the horizon, so Industries of Titan joins the small number of Early Access games I’ll keep revisiting each patch to enjoy in new ways.

If you'd like to see more of my reviews, check out my curator page here: Endyo’s Indies, Abbreviated Reviews, and online at BagoGames