Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic takes the city-building genre and gives it a unique soviet spin, capturing both the look and economic fundamentals of a communist government of the 1970s Soviet Union. While I feel the actual visual side of the game could use an improvement, the economic sim and management aspects of the game are sure to attract the most serious fans of city management games and give them a compelling challenge.
Tropico 6 was, for the longest time, one of my favorite city-building games. Not only was the game genuinely funny, but the Tropico series stood out for the level of detail put into your island’s economic and social management, requiring players to manually influence the influx of dollars and the use of their workforce to create a functioning economy and government. Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic feels strongly inspired by these aspects of the Tropico series and turns them up to eleven, and while ditching the franchise’s humor, it still felt very familiar, albeit unique.
The management side of Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is incredibly in-depth and requires a lot of attention to detail and player involvement. In other words, it’s excellent.
My understanding of a Soviet economy is one in which the state manages everything. As the ruler of your Soviet Republic, you will see this idea rings true, tasking the player with doing much more than just placing buildings and waiting for their civilians to interact with them.
Have you just built an apartment block? Invite workers of various education levels to come to live there. Just erected a shopping center? Manually adjust and purchase the goods disturbed to your civilians. Farming? It’s up to you to individually purchase the vehicles used to keep the farms running efficiently. Each aspect of the game’s economy (and there are a lot of them) requires detailed management from the player in order to run at all, much less effectively. The systems in place make the Tropico series of games feel simple in comparison.
The game simulates international trade well, with an interesting use of two currencies (rubies and dollars), which aren’t interchangeable and are earned by trading with the East or West, respectively. Who you choose to trade with determines which resource you have more of, and you can choose which to spend when constructing a building or purchasing goods. Goods needed to complete a production chain can also be outright purchased, which helps with the game’s long food growth time.
What’s even more interesting is that you don’t actually need to spend money to construct anything. Doing so auto constructs a building, which is a huge help, but you can choose instead to construct a building for free using resources. Doing so requires workdays (aka time) and other resources.
Technically, you can build your entire self-sufficient economy using nothing more than time and labor.
Something that I find incredibly interesting about Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is that it extends the idea of City Building beyond the realm of cities.
In Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, you’re managing just that: A Soviet Republic. Historically, that could absolutely mean just a single city-state, and if you’re starting on a blank map, that is precisely what you’ll be like for a while. However, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is, in fact, putting you in charge of an entire country, allowing you to build around and expand multiple cities across a large map.
Where this is most interesting and noticeable is when you’re playing a custom game on a pre-established map, which sprinkles the environment with antiquated buildings and cities to expand upon.
In my opinion, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic gets the city-building formula wrong on the decorative and building side.
Having a lot of systems to micromanage is great; players drawn to this genre love a functioning economy that only functions through their involvement. What players also love from the city-building genre, however, is the ability to make an aesthetically pleasing city that is as fun to look at as it is functional. I pointed this out in my review of Manor Lords, a game that perfectly captures the building and aesthetic side of the genre.
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic has issues with its placement options. Buildings don’t place very naturally or aesthetically into the environment, left devoid of sidewalks or any immersive texturing to make them look like part of a city and not just an ugly mess erected in the middle of a dirt square. Not only that, but buildings never quite place evenly, with many slightly rotated to the side when selected from the build menu, and trying to rotate using the game’s mouse wheel building rotation doesn’t fix the problem. When trying to connect some buildings to the road, a necessary function for running the building, placing it right up against your other roads, won’t complete the connection, requiring you to pull the building back and leaving a weird-looking mini road stretching outward.
Overall, the game just doesn’t look great. You can’t build an aesthetically pleasing city, so you have to really hone in on the game’s economy simulation and hope the lack of build fantasy doesn’t get to you.
The Final Word
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is one of the most in-depth economic simulators on the market, offering an excellent experience for the management-enthused player. However, poor placement tech means that players interested in the game’s building side will surely miss out.
Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is available on Steam.
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