Part of the Next Fest Steam event going on between June 16 to June 22. Power to the People is a management city builder where you take on the role of a Power Architect, your task? To ensure the lights don’t go out when your cities need them the most!
Like most demos, there is a myriad of features currently locked, as the developers continue expanding upon the game, (and so you don’t essentially get to enjoy it all for free).
There are currently 2 maps available, Phoenix (USA) and Montpellier (France), with 3 set difficulties with over 12 maps projected to be available when the game launches later this year.
Although the maps are not procedurally generated based on the location on each new session, which means you’ll learn where you can and can’t place certain power generators to heart soon enough. The city growth and spawns are randomly generated around what you decide to build.
This means, every time you jump in to try and set that new high score on the leaderboards, you will get an unpredictable challenge. (If uncertainty is something that excites you that is).
As cities grow, their power consumption grows with them.
If you’re used to simulation city builders like Sim City or even Cities Skylines, you may be in the habit of building a cluster of power producing buildings next to one another and having a single line to feed your entire city. It doesn’t quite work like that in Power to the People, because that one line will quickly become overwhelmed, and burn out, leaving you nothing but a world of darkness and chaos.
This adds the main aspect of the game, and that is monitoring every new day cycle the new roads and buildings that are appearing, and monitoring their size and projected power usage to efficiently come up with a plan to deal with their power consumption.
If planning for city growth isn’t enough of a challenge for you, trying to plan in contingencies for potential Mother Nature events will keep you on your toes as solar flares will provide a huge energy surge to your network of lines, burning out entire sections at a moments notice or trees will fall and disconnect half a city on a windy day.
There are a few short-fallings, that we would like to hope the developers look in to however, before the final release.
Currently there is no real incentive to try and stay environmentally friendly when it comes to choosing your power production. Money isn’t a huge factor, soon enough once your area has grown to encompass 4 different cities you can happily afford to build a completely new infrastructure section each day.
Each power producer does have a different range of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) influence. However, assuming your cities never lose power, you never really lose enough satisfaction for buildings being close to these massive facilities to prove to be any sort of issue.
The developers could tune these satisfaction levels, so like us, future players don’t feel like they can just use one factory type for every situation and ignore the other 8 options.
One large looming issue we would like to see addressed is the inability to build anything besides residential power lines within a cities influence. This means, if a city expands to the point of being beyond your original power producers or substations, there is nothing you can do to address the issue without bulldozing half the map, and re-plan the entire cities network.
Final Say
There is no advertised price for the game on our Canadian Steam Store yet, however, we’ve already put in over 5 hours of gameplay on the 2 available maps while on the pursuit of topping the leaderboards.
We believe as long as the game releases under a $30 CAD price tag, with continued support and additional post-release game modes it will be excellent value for money if you are in to this genre of games.
