Rise of Industry

What it is

Rise of Industry puts players in the role of an early-20th-century industrialist, sourcing raw materials, building production chains that turn those materials into increasingly complex intermediate and finished goods, and shipping the results to markets that shift over time as the business landscape evolves. Developed by Dapper Penguin Studios and published by Kasedo Games, it emerged from Early Access into a full release on 2 May 2019.

Its review corpus, 1,869 in English, sits at a genuine Mostly Positive 73.6% (1,376 to 493), and reading through it in depth reveals a corpus in real agreement about the underlying concept's quality — the disagreement centers almost entirely on how much friction players are willing to tolerate to access it.

A genuinely deep production-chain concept

Reviewers consistently credit Rise of Industry with a more sophisticated underlying design than its tycoon-game framing might suggest. "Rise of Industry is an excellent game with a number of barriers that might turn you off before you learn it. It has much more in common with a factory game like Factorio or Satisfactory than a transportation game like Railroad Tycoon or Transportation Tycoon. It's all about complex production chains, often with several intermediate products," writes one detailed reviewer. A separate reviewer frames the appeal directly: "the short version? Yes. It's a great game and is fairly well executed; if you enjoy logistics and management, you will love this game... your job is to source resources, produce products of ascending complexity, and move those products to the market for a profit." A third reviewer, after finishing a full campaign, describes the specific reward of mastering the systems: "after several failed starts, and 15.6 hours, I finished the game and then hit $1,000,000,000 in the bank... I found that it was refreshing, challenging, and a pretty good value at that price."

A dominant, specific interface complaint

This corpus's single most consistent complaint concerns the game's interface and the information it withholds from players trying to run their own operations. "While a fun concept, the UI ultimately falls short of providing you the information you need. It's nearly impossible to chase down how much certain shipments cost you, or the value of an item sold to a location so far away, etc, without involving an excel sheet and about 7 different UI pages which are still clunky to move and manipulate," writes one of the most-upvoted reviews in the corpus. That's a specific, checkable design complaint — not simply "the UI looks dated," but a claim that essential business information a tycoon-sim player needs is genuinely difficult to access within the game itself, forcing manual external tracking to play effectively.

Heavy manual micromanagement without automation

A closely related, equally consistent complaint concerns the amount of manual work required to keep a factory network running. "It's very heavy on micromanagement — basically every single link between any producer and consumer must be manually configured," writes one detailed reviewer, ultimately recommending a genre peer, The Colonists, instead. A separate reviewer echoes the same fatigue: "the tasks [are] repetitive, especially setting up the logistics and flow of goods between industries," and specifically criticizes "constant production alerts" that add friction without adding depth once a network reaches a moderate size. A third, more experienced reviewer describes the pattern in blunter terms: "this game is fun, until it isn't... I give it more of a thumbs down because of the lack of AI competitors and the warehouse logistics breaking," describing large industry complexes as prone to functional breakdown rather than scaling cleanly.

A serious claim about the developer-publisher relationship, treated with caution

One highly-upvoted review raises a specific, serious allegation: "the publisher completely screwed the developers on this game and now the devs don't own any part of it financially or otherwise, and the studio is now defunct — Kasedo literally killed it. Don't buy this on Steam, buy it from a key reseller or any other way that keeps the money out of the publisher's hands." That's a serious claim worth checking rather than repeating uncritically. Official post-launch news for this listing shows continued support updates through at least 2021, including patches, a free playable demo release, and — notably — the 2025 release of a direct sequel, Rise of Industry 2, developed by the same studio. That timeline sits uneasily with a "studio is now defunct" characterization, so this review treats the specific financial-dispute allegation as an unconfirmed, single-source claim rather than an established fact, while still noting it for buyers who may have separate reasons to prefer purchasing through a specific storefront.

A widely-reported early-hours-to-late-hours falloff

Beyond the interface and micromanagement complaints, several reviewers describe a specific arc where initial enjoyment fades. "I can only admit that is the case for the first few hours," writes one reviewer who otherwise credits the developers' evident care for the project, while a separate reviewer frames the same pattern more starkly: "there's simply a lack of interesting gameplay in this title — there is simply not a lot of interesting choices to make, or obstacles to overcome. It's too abstracted and simple to be an engaging simulation." A third, longtime supporter who followed the game since early access ultimately reached a similar conclusion after a later expansion release: "the game development was improving a lot, but unfortunately they've decided to launch a new expansion meanwhile the main game is quite unfinished... I guess it is time to move on."

What the achievement data confirms

Rise of Industry's achievement curve shows a steep, early falloff consistent with the corpus's complaints: 70.5% of players place their first building, but that drops to under half completing basic tutorial and building-variety milestones, and collapses to under 2% for the deepest late-game achievements. That's a meaningfully steeper drop than many tycoon or management sims this lane has documented, corroborating the repeated reviewer accounts of an engaging opening that a large share of buyers don't push through to the deeper stages of the economy.

Verdict

Rise of Industry offers a genuinely deep, Factorio-adjacent take on production-chain logistics wrapped in a traditional tycoon-game framing, and the concept itself draws real, consistent praise from players who push past its opening hours. But a persistently clunky, information-poor interface and heavy manual micromanagement are specific, checkable barriers that a large share of this corpus says cost the game real goodwill before its deeper systems can shine. Try the free demo first, and go in aware that the game demands real patience with its own presentation before it rewards you.