Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is a rough but shining gem in the genre of city builders

In this game, you will manage every small detail in your small republic, including the first roads and houses in your first city, setting up a working infrastructure – roads, water, sewage, electricity, heating - planning vast industrial areas with huge factories while having to manage the ever growing logistics required to keep your cities alive.
You can use a wide range of historical trucks, busses, cars, trains, planes, trains and ships to accomplish this, and the choice of vehicles is important – good luck moving 1000 tons of crops through your republic with small trucks, or supplying a factory with 700 workers per shift (meaning 2100 a day) with two tiny busses.

This is a review, not a guide, and at the end of the day, you will just have to make sure that you make more money by exporting stuff than you spend on imports. There are lots of different industries available, and many of them are a viable choice when starting your republic.
Meanwhile, your workers need culture, sport, hospitals and police stations, supermarkets and bars, or they will leave your republic.
None of those mechanics are new or exotic, but their complexity, depth and the way they are implemented are unrivaled by any other city builder.

Workers and Resources is, in every sense, a hardcore-city-builder, because even tiny mistakes can and will have dire consequences for your population and economy – and trust me, you will make mistakes. I still make them after more than 500 hours in this game. There is no shame in using backups and regular auto-saves.

Like in any game, the difficulty is adjustable – you can instantly contruct buildings with money just like in your regularcity builder, you can just teleport required goods like food right into your supermarket and you can disable your vehicles needing fuel – but this makes the game easy and also, even worse, ordinary.

But Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is not an ordinary game. There is just such a great amount of satisfaction of seeing every brick and board transported to your construction site, watching your busses drive relentlessly through the thick snow to get your workers in the factory and seeing your trains moving hundreds of tons of resources at once.
There is also a great amount of frustration involved when you realize your planned factory is not working at all because you forgot to build a sewer or that you can not move the produced goods fast enough.
If you are prone to giving up easily after one small mistake, this might not be the game for you. If you love to learn from your mistakes, come up with solutions to salvage a situation or you just like planning things and enjoy them working out – then this is the game you want.

I said earlier that Workers and Resources is a „rough“ gem. This is because there are some smaller flaws, like road placement and the fact that this game will sometimes crash (again, make sure you use the auto-save feature). Some people may also not like the graphics, although I think they are perfectly in line with the soviet aesthetics. Many mechanics are also not completely explained in the game, but there is a huge amount of tutorials online when you have questions about specific topics, and the community is very helpful.

All in all, this is easily one of the deepest, complex and most fun city builders on the market right now – don’t just give it a try, embrace it and spend your whole night planning your next district.

My favorite game of all time. Extremely detailed and immersive. If you enjoy detail and complexity in your games, this is the game you need. Also, 10/10 for comradely vibes ☭

The first campaign lulls you into a false sense of security. "Yeah, okay, I can just about handle these systems." Roads, farms, factories, housing, workers and things workers need in order to live happily.

Then the second one throws you into an absolute mess of a scenario and introduces all the OTHER systems of the game - electrical wires, water, sewage, heating, garbage, demolition rubble and a dozen other things. Several of which operate around systems of variable-size pipes, where each section of pipe must have its own pump, and if you want to split one pipe into several? Yep, you need a second pump downstream of the splitter, for each section. You might think this rapidly turns into a confusing micromanagement nightmare, and you'd be right!

7.5% of players finished the FIRST campaign, where those things are not a concern and you are generally asked to use your generous starting funds to build stuff, read an explanation of what the stuff was, and then move on to the next thing.

The random maps, and several of the scenario ones, are nothing like the campaign maps; rather than terrain extending beyond the realistically jagged boundaries of your nation, you instead have a perfect square of mostly flat terrain with NOTHING outside of it. Just a bunch of customs houses leading into the void. Lazy map design which would be less egregious if it weren't so obvious that these devs can do way better, and have. Once or twice. And again, possibly, with the paid map packs. But if you're selling something separately which really should have been in the base game, well, you may just have missed the point of communism!

Now, there is some fun to be had in this game. Some. The railway system mostly works well. It can be nice watching and listening to your trains as they chug around the game world, through industrial and residential areas you've designed and named. But so many of the advanced features seem specifically designed to suck all the fun out of playing. Realistic? Sure, I guess. Turns out, running a realistic communist society all by yourself is a massive hassle. Ideally you'd want some help. So if you do play, maybe just leave most or all of the advanced management stuff off (trying to place a garbage bin, sewage tank or water pump in a crowded city block and finding the last remaining space is blocked by power wires, isn't that enjoyable), since a simplified SimCity/Cities Skylines type "just draw water pipes through the general area and you're good" system is not an option here.

I'd start over on the first campaign map again with the advanced settings turned off, but I really just can't be bothered. Could have just kept playing after the campaign ended, in retrospect; I thought "It might be fun to explore those other features the tutorials briefly mentioned and then moved right on from", but... no. No it wasn't. Your mileage may vary, of course. If you love unnecessary complications, this may be your dream game!

Otherwise, in general, not recommended.