Kaiserpunk Review: A Grand City Builder That Forgot to Be a Good Game
It had one of the coolest premises of the year: an Anno-style city builder mixed with Hearts of Iron grand strategy in a post-WWI dieselpunk world. It’s a spectacular idea. Too bad the game itself is a spectacular failure.
Every so often, a game comes along with a concept so brilliant you can't help but fall in love with it. Kaiserpunk was that game for me. A grand city builder set in an alternate 20th century where you rebuild a city-state from the ashes of a devastating Great War, industrialize, and then wage war on a global scale. It’s Anno meets Frostpunk meets Risk. On paper, it's a masterpiece.
In practice, even months after its rocky launch, it remains a broken, baffling, and infuriating mess that has no business being sold as a full 1.0 release. I’ve spent hours trying to love this game, trying to see past its flaws to the gem underneath. But the flaws aren't just small cracks in the foundation that you can ignore; they are the foundation.
The Glimmer of a Good Game
Let's start with the one thing the game gets mostly right. The core city-building loop, when you're just focused on your own little corner of the world, can actually be pretty damn satisfying.
There's a deep web of over 90 interconnected production lines, and turning salvaged scrap and raw lumber into a thriving metropolis feels rewarding. The aesthetic is fantastic, with early-tier buildings looking like they were cobbled together from the ruins of the old world. Watching your city evolve from a shantytown into a roaring 20s-style metropolis is genuinely cool. It has that addictive "just one more building" quality that makes games like Anno so compelling. But that's where the praise ends.
A Masterclass in Terrible Design
For every good idea in Kaiserpunk, there are a dozen baffling design choices that feel like they were implemented by someone who has never actually played a city builder before.
The Tyranny of the Depot: I don't know who on the development team has a fetish for depots, but they need to be stopped. You need them for everything. Every single production building has to be within the tiny radius of a depot. In a small town of 1,000 people, you'll have 30 of these things littered everywhere. It's unrealistic, it's ugly, and it's fucking boring.
Services on a Leash: The service building ranges are a joke. A single police station or fire department can only cover a few city blocks. A water tower, which in the real world can serve an entire town, has a laughably small radius. This forces you to spam essential services every 500 feet, turning your city into a repetitive, nonsensical grid.
Busted Production Rates: The economic balance is completely out of whack. You'll need ten industrial-sized flour mills to supply a town that a single farm should be able to feed. Buildings have insane upkeep costs that make no sense. It feels less like managing an economy and more like plugging leaks in a dam with your fingers.
A Pointless Tech System: Research isn't tied to universities or any logical progression. You unlock new tech simply by spamming a certain number of buildings from the previous tier. It's a shallow, mindless system that encourages you to just plaster the map with cheap buildings instead of thinking strategically.
The "Grand Strategy" That Isn't
The moment you zoom out to the world map, the game completely falls apart. The sense of scale is shattered. You go from managing the individual needs of 200 machinists in your city to commanding an army to conquer "Central Europe," a single, indivisible territory on a map that looks like it was ripped straight from the board game Risk.
The combat is an absolute joke. It’s a glorified auto-battler where you just smash your stack of units into the enemy's stack and pray your numbers are bigger. There is no strategy, no tactics, no depth. It's a tedious, boring afterthought, which is a massive problem for a game that wants you to focus so heavily on building a war machine.
The AI on this map is a cheating bastard, even on easy. Within the first year of the game, I had an AI on the other side of the world declare war on me and immediately send a full stack of max-tier bombers to wipe out my starting army. It feels like the AI doesn't have to play by any of the rules you're bound to. They just get to spawn units and research tech at a ludicrous speed, making the entire strategic layer feel pointless and unfair.
A Lingering Technical Mess
The game launched in a disastrous state, with constant crashes, game-breaking bugs, and abysmal performance. To the developers' credit, they've been patching it. The save-game corruption bugs seem to be mostly fixed, and the performance is... better. It's no longer an unplayable slideshow, but it still runs far hotter and slower than it has any right to, even on a high-end PC.
The UI remains a clunky, unresponsive nightmare. Tooltips still disappear, menus overlap, and basic quality-of-life features like being able to sort resources are completely missing. This doesn't feel like a polished, finished product. It feels like an alpha build that's been getting emergency life support for the past few months.
The Verdict
Kaiserpunk is a tragedy. It has a brilliant concept and a solid city-building core that is absolutely buried under a mountain of baffling design flaws, a laughably bad combat system, and a lingering lack of technical polish. While some of the worst launch-day bugs have been squashed, the fundamental problems that make the game a frustrating and often joyless experience remain.
This game should have been released in Early Access, and even then, I would have serious doubts about its direction. In its current state, I cannot recommend it to anyone. There are dozens of other city builders and grand strategy games out there that are infinitely more polished and, more importantly, actually fun to play.
4/10 A fantastic idea executed so poorly that it borders on tragedy.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.