DSS 2: War Industry Review

One solo developer's dream of Total War without the loading screens

DSS 2: War Industry, developed and published by the solo developer known as vikingfabian, released 28 October 2025 at NZ$27.99, is a grand strategy game built around a single, continuous world map where city-building, deep resource simulation, and real-time battles all play out without the separate instanced battle maps genre veterans are used to. Cities grow through automated worker priorities, soldiers can be equipped with any combination of animals, weapons, and gear, and battles can scale to thousands of individually simulated units at once. It's a genuinely striking concept, described by more than one reviewer in its 179-review Very Positive sample as something they'd personally dreamed of seeing built but never expected any developer, let alone a solo one, to actually attempt.

That ambition earns real, specific admiration across the sample. Reviewers repeatedly frame the game in direct comparison to the Total War series, but praise it specifically for running as one persistent, unbroken world rather than jumping between a strategic map and separate battle instances, calling it a genuinely fresh structural idea for the genre. Multiple reviewers single out the sheer scale on offer, describing battles involving hundreds of individually pathed units as some of the largest they've seen a game this size attempt to simulate. The developer's conduct draws consistent, specific praise as well: reviewers describe a transparent, welcoming solo dev who publishes an active roadmap, responds to feedback without getting defensive, and has kept shipping patches at a steady clip since launch, addressing bugs and quality-of-life complaints reviewers raised in earlier versions of their own reviews.

Set against that ambition is a genuinely large and specific cluster of complaints, concentrated heavily around the user interface and core automation systems. One reviewer memorably describes the game's menus as feeling like "retextured Excel," a complaint echoed in less colourful terms by several others who describe an overwhelming amount of raw data thrown at the player with little contextual explanation of what any of it actually means for their empire. That UI friction compounds a deeper complaint about the automation the game's city management explicitly leans on: multiple negative reviewers report entire towns simply refusing to gather assigned resources, workers capped in ways that don't scale with a growing settlement, or production chains that silently stall with no clear feedback explaining why. Combat draws its own specific frustrations, with reviewers describing armies that split into individual units and move unpredictably when ordered to chase or intercept an enemy, and at least one detailed reviewer reporting defending units bizarrely swimming out to sea to meet an incoming naval attack rather than holding their position.

Performance and onboarding round out the more serious complaints. Several reviewers describe the game slowing to a crawl during extended sessions, particularly once a city is populated and the camera is zoomed in close, and more than one specifically recommends sticking to smaller maps to keep the simulation from becoming unmanageable. The tutorial draws consistent criticism as too simplistic for what reviewers agree is a genuinely complex game, with several describing it as little more than a sequence of "click this, then this" prompts that leave deeper systems, particularly diplomacy and the economic prioritisation tools, almost entirely unexplained.

It's worth engaging directly with a specific, recurring thread in the negative reviews: several reviewers explicitly say the game's rough edges and evident unfinishedness would read very differently, and draw far less criticism, if it had launched labelled as Early Access rather than a full 1.0 release. One reviewer cites the developer's own stated estimate that the game was only around two percent complete at launch, a striking admission that, whether taken literally or as a rhetorical flourish, lines up closely with the scale of missing polish reviewers describe elsewhere in the sample. That's a fair and important framing for prospective buyers to sit with: DSS 2: War Industry isn't officially tagged Early Access on its store page, and this review treats its 28 October 2025 release as the genuine original launch it appears to be, but the actual state of the game on arrival, judged purely on what reviewers who bought it on day one experienced, reads much closer to an ambitious early-access build than a finished commercial strategy game.

Price sits at an unusually modest NZ$27.99 for a game of this scope, and the sample's reaction to that value proposition splits along largely the same lines as everything else. Several reviewers explicitly frame their purchase as a conscious act of support for a single developer's evident years-long labour rather than a straightforward transaction for a finished product, with one describing buying it "not because it was ready" but because they wanted to help speed along a vision they could clearly see taking shape. Others are considerably less forgiving on the same point: at least one blunt negative review argues the current build is worth a small fraction of its asking price given the state of its core systems, and a handful of refund reports in the negative sample describe buyers deciding the jank simply wasn't worth pushing through even at a relatively low price point. That split is worth taking seriously on its own terms, since it isn't really a disagreement about the game's ideas, which draw near-universal praise, but about how much unfinished friction a buyer should reasonably tolerate before a fair price stops feeling fair.

Taken together, DSS 2: War Industry is one of the more genuinely novel strategy concepts to launch in a long while, built almost entirely by a single, evidently dedicated developer, and its Very Positive score is a real testament to how much goodwill that ambition and transparency has earned from an engaged early audience. But the scale of the UI and automation problems reviewers describe is large enough, and specific enough, that this isn't yet a game to recommend to anyone who isn't already a patient grand strategy veteran willing to fight through real jank in exchange for a genuinely original idea.