After a major update, WW1 grand strategy game Kaiserpunk deserves another chance

Kaiserpunk has a lot of ambition. As well as a city-builder and pseudo factory sim, it’s also a WWI-inflected grand strategy game, combining the close-up management of Cities Skylines 2 with the world-conquering scale of Crusader Kings and Civ 7. Considering everything that it’s trying to pull together, Kaiserpunk already works incredibly well. But it could be better. After a tricky Steam launch and some frank player feedback, developer Overseer has just released a major new update. If you bounced off Kaiserpunk at first, or you’re yet to try it out, now may be the time to play.

It’s the end of WWI and Europe is fractured into tiny, warring city states. As the commander of a small band of survivors, your job is twofold: create a functional town, complete with housing, supplies, and a booming economy, and then raise an army to conquer the entire continent. At one level, Kaiserpunk is a detailed city-building game with production line mechanics. At another, it’s a sprawling, stats-based grand strategy game set across dozens of different countries.

So far, 67% of Kaiserpunk’s aggregated Steam user reviews are favorable, marking it with the less-than-auspicious ‘mixed’ rating. A significant update from April 14 already improved Kaiserpunk’s interface, lighting, and overall visual quality. Now, Overseer has released a second sizable patch. Kaiserpunk’s visuals have been improved once again, and the central performance problems reported by players have all been addressed.

You can now zoom further in and out while managing your city and there is a greater quantity of resources available during the world map sections. Two new utility buildings – the large water tower and large power substation – make connecting your essential services a lot simpler, and Overseer has made changes to reduce Kaiserpunk’s memory usage, so it should run more smoothly.

“We’re continuing to listen to what you like and what you don’t as we plan for future updates,” Overseer says. “We have a big one planned for May, and we hope to share more details soon. To give you an idea, you can expect a major boost to the performance, as some of our long-term efforts will bear fruit. Additionally, there will be significant visual updates to the world map and the ability to queue movements for naval units.”

Between Civilization 7, Cities Skylines 2, Frostpunk 2, and several more, the standards for strategy games are becoming more rigorous – when it comes to sequels especially, a lot of genre mainstays have struggled to inspire the expected plaudits and enthusiasm. It was only released in March, so Kaiserpunk has a long way to go. Hopefully, between this latest update and the one coming in May, Overseer can make its debut game shine.

If you’re a big strategy game fan, we’ve put together definitive lists of the best RTS games and the best 4X games on PC.

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