Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
Manage all aspects of your own republic with planned economy, including mining resources, manufacturing goods, construction, investments, and citizens too. Create your own industrial complexes with loading and unloading stations, storage, warehouses, and factories. Build the infrastructure and manage its traffic, including roads, railways, sidewalks, conveyors, wiring, and pipelines. Wisely place and connect factories, houses and warehouses, and make the most efficient connections. Plan and build the living areas with everything your citizens may need to live their happy life, such as playgrounds, cinema s, taverns, and shops. Send your citizens to the mine to get coal, iron and other natural resources; or send them to the fields to pick up the crops; or take them to factories to produce manufactured goods. Sell and purchase resources and goods from western countries or other soviet countries to get dollars or rubles and buy the products or resources you need.
Steam User 1288
This game is for people of systems. It is as addictive as Factorio really, and as enjoyable as Transport Fever.
But God save you if you let the "City Builder" tag fool you in a false sence of security - it has almost nothing in common with any of Simcity games, and only surface similarity to Cities Skyline series.
WRSR is deeper, MUCH DEEPER.
I'm not talking about comlexity, though game does have it in drowes, to the point when Cities Skylines would seem too shallow, forever unable to scratch the newfound itch, you never thought you have. I'm talking about your worldview.
No, you will not suddenly become a communist, nor the game make you prone to the socialist thought. It will not move your political allignment one inch. But game WILL make you appreciate all your everyday life conveniences.
You will see - buses around you are not going on their own, tap water didn't made itself available for you by some kind of a magic spell, elecrticity is not something made who-knows-where, constantly available and convenient just because.
These things are the product of systems. In fact - you are too.
Game lets you make some of those, tinker with them, and try yourself as the system architect and engineer. Your reward here is not the numbers on the Republic's bank account (game will make you understand - money is meaningless, while labor is not), your reward is beatifully functioning Republic, self-sufficient or not.
My personal experiece with WRSR is quite similar to the bonsai-tree growing, or trainset building. At this point it's meditative, relaxing and even creative hobby of mine. Through 5 years I've spent far more time on it than I care to admit.
Most remarkable thing about WRSR for me - It made me genuinly interested in the soviet city planning.
I was born in Siberia, in the town of oil workers right at the time of the Soviet Union's collapse. The town itself was constructed in the middle of nowhere among wast Vasyugan marshes near Ob river. Our parents all were at the mercy of town's oil industry - but town itself was only the sleep-place, while nearest oil rig needed to be reached by a helicopter (due to endless marshes and overall lack of infrastructure). The place wasn't exactly small (47k residents in its peak), but nevetheless peculiar, young both by average age of its inhabitants, and by itself (being founded in the 1966). It've always seemed like an island of sorts, both connected to the rest of the country with oil pipes and things, and nevertheless isolated. Quite strange feeling, I wasn't able to really put my thumb on it.
And now, with the help of WRSR, I DO understand how and why the place was the way it is.
Look for Strezhevoy on wiki, if you interested.
Buy it, play it.
10/10
Steam User 298
As the meme says: If you think this is going to be another city building game, you're not gonna have a good time.
If you're looking for a regular city building game, go play I don't know, Cities Skylines 1 or 2, or one of the Simcities, I hear they are lovely this time of the year.
If you have already played city building games and want a bit more realistic one, and don't mind ugly concrete architecture, or even better, actually love concrete brutalism as an architecture style of choice, this is a game for you.
First go play the tutorials, and then start playing with almost all of the systems disabled, and then when you start understanding how the game works on a base level, start by turning the systems on one by one in an existing game to learn them out.
The game simulates many, many, many things that are just obfuscated or handwaived away in other city builders. On base settings you can buy buildings by paying money, either rubles or dollars to your friendly neighbours to build things, but the fun part is when you start building things yourself. Because then you need to get concrete, gravel, and asphalt from somewhere, get relevant trucks to transport it to the construction site, get an excavator on site to do the groundworks for the factory and then you need even more concrete, some bricks and steel to build the actual building, and after that even more steel and mechanical components to build the machines inside. After the factory is finished you need to ensure it gets the necessary raw materials so it can produce whatever it is producing for you, maybe you can use the bricks now in building other buildings so you don't need to buy them expensively from your friendly neighbour across the border. That is if you get workers there, and the building has electricity, drinking water for the toilets, and oh yeah, toilets, that reminds me, how have you planned and built the sewage pipes to take away the waste water? Also, now that we are producing things, there's all kinds of garbage and broken bricks that are starting to collect in the garbage dumper, when is the garbage truck coming to load all of them up and taking them to the dump?
And just keep multiplying this on and on.
The game is really good, but the learning curve is really steep, but on realistic mode it is nice how good it feels to finally get a gravel road built all the way from the border to your laid out shell of a town, as that means that all of the building materials and foreign workers don't need to crawl along on the old mud road that turns into a morass when ever it rains, nevermind snows. Which reminds me, did you have enough snowplows to clear the streets during winter?
Steam User 368
This has ruined other City Builder games for me. Excellent job depicting real life vehicles, buildings, and places. The developers have clearly put a lot of passion and effort into this game.
Don’t skip the tutorial.
Steam User 226
Coming from a City skylines refugee this game is great in so many different ways.
Pro's
-The personality of W.R.S.R is strong with the main theme of communism being a key point in this city builder.
(approved by the K.G.B)
-The Production lines in W.R.S.R is well thought out (except the coal bricks) with it being actually important than in City Skylines.
-If you play city skylines and want to switch then this games is a lot more optimized for any computer :)
-Traffic Management is considerably easier in my opinion since every citizen doesn't automatically spawn with a car.
-The music in this game is well done with a mix of soviet choir, folk and even techno, all of which fit in.
-A single factory actually feels impactful unlike other city builders with them needed to be occupied by hundreds of employee's and producing an overwhelming amount of resource's.
-The BEST mechanic is definitely the secret police who are attractive, good people with loyalty to socialism and nikita kruchtev/breshnev/gorbachov :).
(approved by the K.G.B)
Inbetween
-So since the game takes place within the U.S.S.R which had a command economy that means the game is alot more manual than other city builders which will be better for some players than others.
-The water sewage and electricity mechanics is more complex than in other city builders which will yet again be good or bad for some players.
Cons (western propaganda)
-It seems like citizens cant understand going from to Public transport -> Public transport -> to work so the AI may need some tweaking.
-Whenever a vehicle go's behind a slow vehicle they crawl to as stop instantly distrupting all traffic instead of slowing down earlier.
-Theres not many road options just only really get 2 lane at a time and tram/trolley bus roads.
- TBH i dont want to type the rest of my nitpicks
valid cons
-money exists >:( dam crapitalists
GLORY TO THE USSR AND HAVE A SAFE TRIP COMRADE
Steam User 211
TLDR: This is your game if you seek a challlenge and have a solid frustration tolerance.
This game has some aspects of many games of the genre, like Tropico, Transport Fever, Cities Skylines and maybe even Factorio, but overall it's quite unique. It is the most realistic game of it's kind that i'm aware of and also the most difficult one if you play it that way. however the difficulty isn't just in planning your cities and transport and production stuff and learning to get the correct size/dimension of things for your task, but also in the micro management. and this is one of the downsides in my oppinion. you just need to manage too much stuff and you need to change too many things too often. your republic is dynamic, you expand, you change things, but the game really gives you trouble reacting to all those changes. for me this just feels too much like work and not like playing a game sometimes. there is so much stuff to do, that doesn't really contribute to the overall growth. for example providing water, sevage, power and heat to your people is an essential task, which makes sense. i spend hours fiddeling with sewage pipes that won't connect because the hight is wrong but i can't exactly figure out why, i spend time expanding the water stuff with more pumps, hubs, etc. you need to gradually expand your networks, which is fine, but then you need to rebuild connections, the throughput is not enough anymore, the distribution doesn't work, whatever. this might be partially on me for bad planning, but it's just a small part of the game that feels like a major part, and it's just annoying after a while. however you can change the difficulty to your liking and and get rid of most things you don't wanna deal with. also if you like placing buildings perfectly you might not like it. you can't build everyhting aligned and symmetric and grid like. connections are weird, things aren't parallel, it's chaos sometimes. but then again this might represent the soviet style quite nicely.
for me personally the biggest problem is public transport. it's different than in any other game and it is not intuitive. you just need to learn the system and deal with it. people aren't smart, they can't easily change to another bus and they don't end up where you want them to. you spend a lot of time fixing stuff and asking yourself why things are not working as intended. especially if you play in realism mode. then it is a bit of a waiting simulator. it takes ages for things to be build, sometimes they stop building for non obvious reasons. it's quite realistic.
what i'm trying to say, there is games like chess, where the rules are easy but it is arbitrarily difficult to master, and there is games like soviet republic, where the game is difficult because the rules and micro-management are difficult. and this leads to some frustration, at least for me. this review doesn't sound like i like the game very much, but i do. i think most positive things were already said by other comrades. obviously the complexity and realism has it's nice sides too and you can do things in this game that you can't do otherwise. if you can deal with the downsides this game might occupy you for hundreds of hours. there is lot's of stuff to do. a single game can be a project for months in real life if you want to. i'm quite happy somebody releases a game like this. difficult games aren't necessarily liked by many people. i am quite positive that if you read till here, you'll like it.
Optimism is the opium of mankind! A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!
Steam User 108
The Dark Souls of City Builders.
Steam User 226
15 minute cities: the game. The game is just complex enough to play reasonably well when drunk. I guess this is what the Soviets were doing also.
In my latest game, I have a lake that is 95% on the Nato side, that I've been dumping raw sewage into. Take that you capitalist pigs!
I'm also still trying to build a Lada factory on realistic mode, but keep running out of money before I can build an iron mine.
100% recommended