![]() ![]() I promptly found myself feeling drained by it all as I churned out new tiles and units just for the sake of it, knowing that on the next turn I’d have to make decisions about what to do with those tiles and units. Without the ebb and flow of the demands of economy and infrastructure-that I might need more food to keep my soldiers fed, that I should expand east to capitalize on a food tile, that another settlement has a resource I might want-decision fatigue, paradoxically, sets in quickly. It doesn’t cost water to run a pigsty, or food to run an army-which means there’s no sense of whether your army is proportional to your base size until you use it. You essentially ‘purchase’ tiles, with one-off spends, rather than ongoing maintenance, so there’s no sense of scale. You can build it on top of a ‘food’ tile-but you could also build anything else on top of that ‘food’ tile, and still get that additional food per turn. But there is almost no sense of infrastructure to Punk Wars to push you towards smaller, more immediate plans.Īny resource you exploit is completely independent from another-to build a pigsty garners one food per turn, and nothing else other than building upgrades influences that. ![]() In a 4X game, you typically explore, expand, exploit, and-of the most interest to Punk Wars-exterminate. No matter who you play as, you’re tasked with a fight for total control of the map, by destroying everybody else’s watchtowers-but there’s little to drive you towards that goal, other than ‘this is how you win the game.’ Much like the incohesive style and narrative, the game’s own systems are sparse and disconnected. The Atompunks, morally detached and apparently intent on mass experimentation, ultimately share the same goal of mass extermination as everyone else. The Steampunks similarly evoke early British imperialism, but leave it at some snobby dialogue. I’d struggle to argue that the game would be better for committing to the Dieselpunk’s nazi-inspired imagery, but each faction suffers from the same lack of follow through. Still, the language of rival corporations remains, as if you’re meant to be Steelpunk Inc.Įven within the factions, there’s a disinterest in who-or why-they are. The concept of business parks is explicitly referred to as where “once people moved imaginary things from one place to another, for some reason,” making it clear that this new world has little time for such abstract concepts-lost, along with art and history. For instance, the dieselpunk faction are initially depicted in art with a symbol reminiscent of an iron cross-which is a powerful image to even imply-only for their introductory cutscene to immediately flavor them as only seeking financial dominance, making violent euphemism about red ledgers.Īcross every faction, there’s this odd dissonance where loading screen lore facts will drop in tidbits about “corporate fixers,” but the in-game dialogue only refers to military domination. ![]() As a premise, it’s drenched in style and suggests tricky resource wars-but it doesn’t pull through.ĭespite pulling from heavily aesthetic genres, any sense of thematic cohesion falls apart as you begin a 4X-style campaign. In the face of its failure, four competing factions battle for dominance over a dusty and featureless wasteland, while taking inspiration from the sci-fi ‘punk’ genres-the retrofuturistic Atompunk, the interwar-inspired Dieselpunk, old-fashioned Steampunk and hardware-oriented Steelpunk. In Punk Wars, the world has ended after a war to end all wars that-needless to say-didn’t achieve its goal.
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