Oxygen Review – Suffocating Stillness

City Builder games are more often than not an exercise in ergonomic exploitation, rewarding the player for ingeniously extracting and exploiting resources, labor, and industry to create a thriving civilization. These games are always fun, and I latch on especially to the economy or military sides of things, usually focusing on huge exports and solid defense spending when I play Tropico, for example.

Fun as it may be, the extract/exploit gameplay model is one I often find myself reflecting on in these times of a shifting climate, where renewable energy and conservation are constantly the questions. Not to politicize these games, but as someone who plays in the genre a lot and cares about the environment I just end up thinking about the two often.

Recently, I reviewed Terra Nil, a new game in the genre with an important environmental message. The game makes a conscious effort to subvert the genre; Instead of mining and exploiting local resources, you’re returning nature to a dead land. The game is all about conservation, with a hopeful message that careful planning and cultivation can return a ruined world to a lush environment.

Oxygen does something similar but puts itself on a much darker side of the topic.

What is Oxygen?

Oxygen is a city builder released on April 7 of 2023, making it probably the newest game in the genre as of the time of writing. It was developed by Turquoise Revival Games and published by GrabTheGames, and is the developer’s first game of the genre.

Much like Frostpunk, Oxygen adds survival elements to its city-building gameplay. Rather than thriving, your goal in Oxygen is to survive an environment that’s inhospitable to your city, with hard-fought necessities like food and water taking the place of big export items like tobacco or llama sweaters.

Oxygen portrays challenges its players using the survival mechanics ala droughts, freezing temperatures, harsh winds, and most deadly, cracks — giant fissures that erupt from the earth and spew deadly toxens into the air around. And, of course, Oxygen.

Oxygen is your most precious resource in the game of the same name. You kind of need it to breathe in this barren wasteland, which is sort of the first step to being alive. All of your buildings use Oxygen as a resource and must be connected to the main Oxygen hub in order to have breathable air — and thus function.

As a survival game, managing your necessary resources will always be your number one concern over expanding. Growing too fast is often death in a game like this, which challenges genre veterans who usually want to rush to the biggest size they can get. In that way, Oxygen can be considered a city builder designed for genre experts.

The Story of Oxygen

The story of Oxygen takes place in the aftermath of a world-wife natural disaster. This disaster caused so-called Igneous Provinces to sprout up over the Earth; These volcanos open up massive cracks in the Earth that expose lava and toxic gas to the atmosphere, choking and poisoning the air. Soon enough, the wind takes these gases across the entire world, leaving very little oxygen left for the taking.

Rather than return to a pre-evolutionary Earth, what remains of mankind builds the Oxygen Center, a massive device capable of producing precious oxygen. As mankind’s last leader, your main goal is to keep the Oxygen Center running — A process that will require resources and manpower, which are both in rare supply.

Playing Oxygen

The game itself is a pretty straightforward city builder with a somewhat confusing barrier to entry if you don’t play through the tutorials. I prefer a game like this where I can just jump straight into a new game and have everything be fairly obvious, but Oxygen is definitely a game you have to run through the tutorial first if you hope to understand anything.

The way the game plays feels a lot like Banished by Shining Rock Software LLC, almost to the point where I wonder if the game was built on the same engine.

In both games, you manually assign workers to each available job, allowing you to greatly customize how you use your most precious resource, labor. Each villager has a name and a family tree, which makes their lives feel a bit more personal.

Most of your resources early on come from scavenging old buildings, which gives the game a very “post-apocalypse” feel. Everything from coal, which powers your oxygen generator, to metal scraps and rubber, can be collected from the many buildings around the wasteland.

Cracks appear at the start of each game and over the course of a playthrough. These dangerous volatile hazards come with a countdown, and at the end of this count, they spew toxic waste into the air and make living all that much harder. Your only way of defeating these hazards is by putting a gas extractor on top, which then converts the gas to energy. Unfortunately, this technology is not available to you at the start.

Oxygen’s pace is slow, probably slower than any other City-Builder I’ve played. This slow place is likely intended to fill you with a sense of tension, but even with the ticking clock of the Cracks I never felt all that pressed to make the game go faster to save anything but my own attention span.

An interesting concept that fails to excite

While the concept of Oxygen is interesting, it fails to deliver engaging gameplay that lives up to the promise of its premise.

The game presents you with an abundance of resources to manage, with coal feeling like the only one that ever feels like there’s any imperative to gather. Attempting to keep a perfect balance of all the resources you need on hand feels like an impossible tightrope walk, and while I’m sure this is meant to create a sense of tension, it kind of just makes everything feel like busy work. Rather than surviving the apocalypse the best I could, I felt more like I was just cycling between chores until something inevitably exploded.

When you pair the unnecessarily thick glossary of resources you need to gather with the game’s dreary, dried-out atmosphere and uninspired art direction, the game tends to feel tedious at best and a boring slog at worst.

Oxygen was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Oxygen is available on Steam.