Review: Kaiserpunk

Kaiserpunk is a weird game, starting with the genre. Like the hot new strategy game from the timeline where Civilization merged with Sim City, Kaiserpunk distinguishes itself from both city builders and grand strategy. The strangeness continues with the daily grind of ruling an early 20th century city where workers riot when their town of 100 illiterate souls doesn't receive the daily newspapers.

Running the city, big or small (and they all invariably become big), is an act of balance run with the sensibilities of slapstick comedy. Completing a chain of production means overextending your reach and destabilizing the whole economy, the only cure being overextending in the opposite direction. You’ll fix a crisis among laborers by building a factory and hiring a bunch of manufacturers, who need fancy new luxuries, or they will literally riot. You do what you can to keep them calm and begin production on gramophones, which require new factories and new manufacturers.

Congratulations, you just made the problem worse! Now you’ll definitely have to find that oil to refine into rubber, mix it with other materials in new factories, and make lots and lots of radios for the worker class that now dominates your city. Trying to satisfy the needs of a group multiplied its members tenfold and made the tax revenue penalty for not meeting their extra needs a death sentence.

Kaiserpunk (PC, [reviewed])

Developer: Overseer Games

Publisher: Overseer Games

Released: March 21, 2025

MSRP: $29.99

The chain of production

You might think, based on the scenario above, that that this is a city building game about society and its need, not just workers and resources, like so many tabletop strategy games. You couldn’t be further from the truth. Anything regarding humans in Kaiserpunk is laughably abstract. Let’s look at the basic worker: the laborer. They only need two luxury goods to be happy and max out their tax output, clothes and newspaper. Let’s ignore clothes for now, or we’ll be here all day.

How do you make a newspaper? Of course, the answer changes depending on what you mean by “newspaper,” the kind of population it will serve, and the technology available. But this is Kaiserpunk, so of course we use an early 20th century industrial process to serve a population of 100 people who presumably can’t even read.

So, how do you make a newspaper? Well, first you need paper. Actually, first you need cellulose. Actually, first you need wood, and to make wood you need a forester. Not a lumberjack; a whole building dedicated to harvesting and cutting down trees. You’ll then need electricity (a miraculously effective windmill, in this case), then a cellulose factory, then a paper mill, then a printing press, and finally a… wait, the printing press makes newspapers? How do you make books, then? That’s the best part, you don’t!

What about the distribution and the writing of the newspaper? That’s not part of the industrial process, so in Kaiserpunk, it might as well not exist. To be fair, making a newspaper is already complex enough and I’m not asking for it to be even more complex. But it seems strange to keep the cellulose factory and not the part where you infuse a lifeless material with what makes it valuable. Cellulose is here only because the game is very interested in how one resource slots into the complex system of industrial production. Cellulose is an essential component in the production of newspapers, but also ammunition. To make newspapers and not weapons is to throw away precious synchrony between the two production systems.

That’s also why workers are here, as a resource with extraordinary needs and functions that encompasses the entire economy. They’re present in farmland and industry, they're both producers and consumers of the luxury goods that make up many of the resources in the game, but they don’t feel human at all. The ostracization of the workers’ involvement in industry from their humanity permeates the entire game. You unlock jazz clubs long after gramophones and radios because jazz clubs seem more modern, even though live music obviously predates those technologies. Drinkable water serves no role in your city until you introduce chemical processes, even though people (and crops, and forests) need water, too.

In a way, the strangeness is part of the fun, and Kaiserpunk is in on the joke. The few cinematics in the game make fun of it constantly. What’s not fun is trying to stay behind this Jenga tower of an economic system with the few tools that Kaiserpunk gives you and within the strict time/performance ratio it expects.

Chasing perennial growth

Kaiserpunk expects great things from you. Ever greater things, always improving until you’re so far ahead, you might as well cut the game short. You’ll always have a need for growth, even if you make the enemy AI completely incompetent. Let’s go back to our newspaper example from before and take a closer look at cellulose. This material is extracted from wood and is used to make the paper used in magazines, but it’s also one of the ingredients that go into creating ammunition. Every few in-game hours, those two chains of production consume five cellulose each. In the same timeframe, a cellulose factory makes 24 bits of cellulose.

Once you build a cellulose factory, it will consume lots of money and electricity to make way too much cellulose. The only way to justify the expense is to make lots of paper and ammunition, then feed the first to the workers and the second to soldiers. To not waste newspapers you need more workers, and those new workers need a job and other goods to satisfy their other needs. To use ammo, you need to go make militias, and to not waste militias you need war, which requires many interconnected chains of production, each as intricate as the one of cellulose.

Reaching a balance is extremely difficult and, more importantly, inefficient. You’re always propelled forward by a new type of worker with needs you can’t satisfy, or a surplus of material that’s going to waste. If you approach Kaiserpunk as a grand strategy game with intricate production lines and conflict that mimic the war of attritions of the early 20th century, you’ll find yourself right at home. If you were looking forward to a city builder set in the second industrial revolution, where internal politics and worker morale is tracked by social class, this might not be for you.

What Kaiserpunk is missing

I didn’t personally enjoy chasing the ever-faster growth of my city and empire as much as Kaiserpunk would want me to, but I can see how someone could love this constant pressure to improve. I can’t imagine anyone so much as tolerating the tools available to chase this kind of efficiency.

Many of those problems are small things that could be fixed in the future, from unwieldy menus with no sorting or search ability to the tiny thumbnails acting as resource icons (you try to distinguish a laborer from a manufacturer when the portraits are 20 pixels squared). Individually, those would be missing quality-of-life features. Together, they make it genuinely difficult to act on the simulation with the type of control and carefulness that Kaiserpunk demands.

The occasional crashes and weird audio bugs don’t exactly sell the fantasy of a well-oiled system, either. Had it not been so punishing and intricate, it would be easier to forgive those issues. On the other hand, perhaps the grueling process of learning the ins and out of this system through imperfect information is the point, and it does fit a game about building a new empire in the interwar period.

There’s a lot to do in Kaiserpunk, but dealing with it won’t always be pleasant. It’s up to you to decide if this bump in the road to complete mastery of the system is a problem or the point of the game.

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