Rise of Industry, a strategic tycoon game is now out in Early Access

Think you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur and build up a big network of factories, transport lines and build an industrial and financial empire? Take a look at Rise of Industry [GOG, Steam].

Disclosure: Key provided by GOG and GOG links are affiliate links.

The developer, Dapper Penguin Studios (love the name) previously had the game on itch.io, but sadly they've decided to drop the store in favour of GOG and Steam. The game is in Early Access, so it's not currently finished.

There's a fair bit of depth to the game, with 100 individual products that you manage right from harvesting the raw materials up to delivering the final product. You play across procedurally generated maps, where ever-changing biomes will give you an environmental challenge too.

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Annoyingly, the game seems to force itself into windowed mode, which is a problem when playing at 1080p as the bottom is then cut-off by my desktop plus the window titlebar. Launching it with "-show-screen-selector" to get the Unity launcher, selecting fullscreen and then loading it still results in the game reverting to windowed mode. Even editing the config file Unity3D games make, to force it to fullscreen didn't work, as it also reverted. There's also no option to maximise the window, so you're stuck with whatever window size you get. I'm sure there's a few interesting ways on GNOME to hide titlebars and so on, but I shouldn't have to restort to things just to get a game to display the whole thing.

The problem with the above, is that anything below 1080p made the tutorial text small, blurry and hard to read. So I didn't have the best initial experience with it. The developer blamed Unity3D and said they're "Still looking for a better solution" and that a future version "crispifies the UI" which may come in a few days. They also said in regards to my issues that "Ubuntu is a mess. We are supporting Cinnamon and XFCE, but still making the others compatible."—ouch.

Thankfully, it does come with a 64bit build, so if you buy it from GOG you won't be required to hunt down a bunch of 32bit libs, which can sometimes be a nuisance.

It's likely I will cover it in greater detail once some of the initial issues like the above has been sorted. Part of the problem is the version GOG has is out of date, with the latest version making the tutorial a bit clearer (especially with the confusion over the road system). So I will sit on this one for a bit, until it's cleaned up and they get the GOG version up to date.

You can grab Rise of Industry on GOG and Steam.