Rise of Industry 2

My colour-coded spreadsheet instinct kicked in about twenty minutes into Rise of Industry 2, right around the moment I realised my crude oil wasn't reaching the refinery because I'd forgotten to drop a tanker loading facility between the two complexes. That level of interdependency is exactly what SomaSim was going for here, and when the systems click, there is genuine satisfaction in watching a sprawling 1980s industrial empire hum along. The question worth asking right now, with the game sitting at a Mixed Steam rating, is whether the depth justifies the friction. The core loop puts you in charge of building and connecting specialised complexes across fifteen campaign scenarios and an open sandbox mode. Each complex needs its own office, power line connectors, water pipe connectors, access roads tied to the highway grid, and whatever production or extraction buildings match your chosen sector. You can go wide across automotive, aviation, mining, distilleries, breweries, and media manufacturing - turning out televisions, video game consoles, vinyl records, and cassettes - or focus a vertical chain and squeeze margins on a single category. Contracts sit at the heart of the money-making side: you sign deals with global executives to import materials you cannot yet produce yourself, and export finished goods for the big paydays. Executives hired from your own staff can be directed to fast-track research, acquire land, manage unions, or schmooze contacts, which adds a light social layer to what is otherwise a pure logistics puzzle. Post-launch updates have added a pharmaceuticals chain, six new sandbox maps, and a reworked construction toolset, so the content picture has improved since the rocky June 2025 launch. Here is what I genuinely like: the production manual is dense in the best way, the global import-export contract system creates meaningful short-term goals while your longer investments mature, and the retro synth soundtrack combined with live-action cutscenes gives the whole experience a personality that dry management sims usually skip. The graphs and charts for tracking output versus capacity are actually readable once you spend time with them, and for a strategy-focused player, the late-game optimisation problem of deciding whether to build more foundries or renegotiate a supply contract is exactly the kind of decision I want to be making. Now the caveats, and they are not small. The UI is the game's worst enemy. Information you urgently need is scattered across multiple non-stackable menus, supply-chain bottlenecks rarely surface clearly in the interface, and the tutorials, while structurally decent, place dialogue boxes over the very menus they are trying to explain. The pacing also demands patience. Big profits move on big timescales here, and the window between completing one complex and being able to afford the next without going bankrupt can feel like dead time if you are not the kind of player who enjoys auditing cash-flow graphs. The networking system, where you cultivate CEO relationships and government ties, is implemented as menu button presses rather than any tangible gameplay - functional, but thin. For the audience that already owns a mental flowchart of supply-chain dependencies, Rise of Industry 2 offers more than enough to chew on, especially now that post-launch patches have addressed many of the launch-day bugs. If you burned through Captain of Industry or Anno 1800's trade routes and are hunting for the next logistics puzzle, this scratches that itch. Go in with realistic expectations about the UI and the slow early cash flow, treat the sandbox as the main event, and you will likely find a few hundred hours of chain-optimisation waiting for you. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 3 ProtonDB community reports.

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