In modern video game development, experimentation is the destiny of the strong. Or, more often, it is a sign of a beginner. It is usually hard to deny ambition to those who take the first steps. It is different with the skills that help bring conceived innovations to life – sometimes the stars in the sky meet and a project comes out that is not only original, but also of high quality.
Kapital: Sparks of Revolution from the Belarusian studio Lapovich Team aspires to shake up the stale swamp of economic city-building simulators. The desire to do something unique is always commendable, but did you have enough skill for such a complex project?
Bread and circuses
It’s not so easy to determine the genre identity of Kapital. If you look at the screenshots, we look at a classic “hailstorm”: building houses, providing residents with everything they need and enjoying the inevitable urban bustle that occurs in the process. The synopsis from the authors, however, promises otherwise: in their words, we face “a strategy sandbox about the class struggle, a hybrid of city-builder and social manager. I, on the other hand, have a different opinion after getting acquainted with the game, but more about that later.
So, we see a European country at the beginning of the last century. The great war has recently ended, the country lies in ruins, but the ruins of the old world always mean the start of something new. We, the mayor of a small town just starting out on the road to peace, will have to manage the settlement and lead its inhabitants to prosperity.
The level of detail in city life is not impressive: resources move between buildings instantaneously and there’s no animated workflow.
The detail of city life is unimpressive: resources move between buildings instantaneously, and the workflow animation is missing.
The population is strictly divided into social groups: workers, bourgeoisie and nobility. The former are the most numerous (they always outnumber the others by about two to one) and are employed in production, e.g. working in factories. The nobility, as descendants of noble families, are not accustomed to menial jobs, but no one but them can cope with administrative matters requiring education and connections. The bourgeois don’t sit idle either; they have the market activity on their shoulders, which occupies an important niche in the life of the city.
Each group has its own needs, from securing the right to housing (the townspeople who can’t find a corner will huddle around fires in the middle of nowhere) to entertainment. Standard, in principle, the story for such strategies: people are always wanting something, and the leadership must provide everything as quickly as possible.
The interesting thing is that our mayor’s resources are usually few and far between. You have to choose who you want to put a roof over your head – the common laborer who bends his back in the factory, or the high-born sir who enforces the city’s laws. Of course, it’s not about micromanagement of each resident – we are, after all, in the role of the mayor, our decisions are global and not limited to the construction of buildings. From time to time the player can pass bills which gradually open up not only new buildings, but entire gameplay possibilities.
Building neighborhoods with buildings of the same type is necessary not to optimize logistics (which is absent here). It’s just easier to monitor their work. Unfortunately, there’s no normal statistics and reports.
Building neighborhoods with the same type of buildings is not necessary to optimize logistics (which is absent here). It’s just easier to control their work – unfortunately, normal statistics and reports are not provided.
This, by the way, is very appealing, especially on the first playthrough – the gameplay is developing not quantitatively, but qualitatively. If in the first stage of the city we are engaged in the simplest activities, such as providing local food, then further open up opportunities related to the market and medicine, but most attention is paid to law and order. From regular police patrols to covert operatives looking for bandits and rioters, there’s always something for law enforcement in our town.
Residents here love to publicly express their civic position: the low level of happiness of the individual social group leads to the fact that a crowd of dissatisfied people gather somewhere in the outskirts and after a while go to burn the palace of the mayor. You can stop them by completing demands that don’t boil down to the banal “Give up N resources”: there will definitely be a side-task, like “Get a few houses built for the working class”. However, the discontented can be dispersed with brute force, up to and including the use of firearms – if you’re not afraid of a social explosion, of course.
At a later stage, we will have to deal more closely with politics: the instructions from the advanced code of laws, which opens after studying and building the Duma building, depend on the balance of power between the three political parties, each of which supports its own social class. Finally, in campaign mode we are also given a story, which, however, traditionally serves as a tutorial, albeit stretched in this case for the entire game cycle.
The gameplay ideas put into Sparks of Revolution is a vivid example of the desire to come up with something new without regard to the canons of the genre. And here, as you can see, it’s time for those very noes, without which, unfortunately, you can’t do without. Yes, it’s about the quality of the realization of the ideas – and not only that.
The victim of ambition.
The more features in the game, the harder it is to assemble them into a single, consistent system that will not just work adequately, but give the user the pleasure of contemplating what is happening on the screen. Here, however, as it often happens, in the pursuit of a wealth of features, the developers could not do without a bunch of “crutches”, which are still not able to make the gameplay fully attractive. I will not touch the purely technical features like bugs, outdated graphics and dull design (although judging by screenshots of old versions, the original versions were much clearer) – in such a project is not the main thing. But the problems with balance and the so-called gameplay loop can not be avoided – it catches the eye much more clearly than the illegible lettering in the interface.
The streets are littered with corpses. This is not a consequence of epidemic or war – just that the cost of burial is too high, so the undertakers have been put on unpaid leave.
For economic strategies, where the player makes global decisions, detailed statistics are very important – think of any worthy representative of the genre. But in Kapital, even the city’s income is only available in general terms, not to mention such subtleties as profit charts, full-fledged reports with filters and other indispensable tools – none of this is the case. When you have a couple of factories and a hundred residents, it’s okay, but what to do when the city grows and the current state of affairs can no longer keep track of manually looking through the statistics of each building?
The work of law enforcement highlights the main problem of this game – a good idea with a weak implementation.
The work of law enforcement highlights the main problem of this game – a good idea with a weak implementation.
Managing the economy blindly is simply impossible – the consequences of decisions have to be guessed rather than foreseen based on knowledge of the mechanics. The gameplay turns into chaos – resources come and go, residents go about their business, potentially interesting features like fighting crime are flashed somewhere in the background, while we just watch from a distance. This is not a strategy of indirect control, as I had hoped at first, but you can not command, going into every detail – the game simply does not work the way it should.
By the time you get to the most interesting part – the advanced legislation that allows you to seek support for your decisions among one of the three political parties, the gameplay falls apart completely.
Kapital: Sparks of Revolution is not a full-fledged economic simulator – the economy is too sparse here. Another genre? But we are not told a story whose plot moves are created on the fly, depending on our decisions, as a sandbox with indirect control implies – it lacks freedom of action and unique game situations. Nor is it a puzzle game with the search for the optimal solution, cleverly concealed under the shell of a difficult decision-making simulator, like Frostpunk (with which our current guest has many features in common).
What’s left? A set of interesting ideas, poorly connected to each other, buried under a pile of unnecessary and simply dysfunctional mechanics.
Pros: early 20th century graphic design; consistent introduction of new mechanics as the game progresses.
Cons: balance problems; bugs; opaque game economy; many gameplay elements do not work as intended.