I regretted naming Titan Industries PC Gamer Dot Com after the toxic gas and massive fires that killed 100 colony citizens. Because it is not a good brand. But such a loss, which would be considered a catastrophe elsewhere, is like leaving a box of staples on a miserable moon of Saturn.

In the corporate realm of the distant future, no one seems to care that much about death. People are quickly replaced, inspiring a brutal kind of pragmatism that sees all other concerns as secondary to gaining a seat on the corporate council. It's all about reaching a point where you can play space golf all day and not have to pay taxes.

That noble dream starts with a one-floor HQ. Unlocking additional buildings requires an abundance of cash and resources that you don't yet have on hand, but don't worry. Devices that provide energy, fuel, housing, storage, and income can be installed using resources gathered from the surrounding area.

Driving employees to the ruins of failed Titan colonizers can provide them with the minerals and isotopes they need. Since such ruins are ubiquitous, you are, in effect, building the city of tomorrow, a shining neon gleam in a monolithic graveyard, looting the corpses of Titan's structures to build new ones. This serves as a constant reminder of the cost of failure, while at the same time giving the game a distinctly apocalyptic aesthetic.

Ruins contain relics as well as resources, but it is not possible to extract both from a single building. Relics are used to advance randomized technology trees, and in most cases contain very useful bonuses, such as dramatically reducing the energy required for a particular building. Citizens just rummage around and watch ads for cash (until they unlock the office), while employees do everything else. Exploration to ruin is limited by the influence used to unlock new tiles. Thus, something as simple as exploring a ruin can lead to different decisions, creating friction and new opportunities.

As more resources and credits are accumulated, factories can be built. Since space is limited both inside and outside, a lot of time will be spent maximizing space in the beginning. Thankfully, you can build more buildings and add new floors, or even connect two adjacent buildings to increase the floor space, albeit slightly. There is always the sense that even when faced with many obstacles, there are many ways around them.

The wide variety of device shapes and sizes makes interior construction a bit tricky, but there is joy in the novelty of a city builder that actually lets you get inside the building and tinker around. It's just a shame that you can't see everything that can be done right away. Once you've saved a few blueprints, you'll probably never go inside them again, even on future missions. What feels like the biggest hook in the game will just be an afterthought.

While the interior will be largely irrelevant, the factory itself will remain important. This is true even after unlocking several buildings, many of which are essentially powerful versions of equipment. That power comes at a cost, both in terms of the initial cost in credits and resources and the ongoing drain on the economy and labor.

A plant full of fuel generators can be completely unmanned and not degrade the livability of the surrounding area, while a stand-alone fuel turbine requires staffing and no one wants to live near it. Which is best depends on many factors that are constantly changing, and while it was fun to have to make these considerations every time we needed to expand our infrastructure, this was actually more of an internal motivation. Efficiency is often encouraged, but not essential.

There is one type of internal equipment that cannot be replaced by unlockable buildings: the processor and its associated modules. This is where industrious and brainwashed employees upgrade their resources. Higher-tier resources give more construction units, and what they build with them becomes more powerful. It's a tantalizing system that feels like the basis for a large Anno-style production network, but unfortunately, it never appears. As it expands outward, the demand for more isotopes and minerals grows, but this system never gets any deeper than what we saw in the first 30 minutes.

Titan's industry begins to lose its edge really quickly and then morphs into a more familiar kind of city builder. After one mission, there is surprisingly little to discover. Some systems, however, remain fascinating.

Contamination is a particularly interesting and potentially deadly obstacle. People can be easily replaced, so death is not a major concern, but once people start hearing about the contaminated inferno you've created, there will be fewer immigrants available. There is no catchy slogan like "Come to Titan and you will get cancer." This can be addressed with air purifiers and giant fans, but these structures also affect the xetane gas that is essential to operate the buildings and equipment that provide energy. Titan's industry is not particularly demanding, but this is a tricky balancing act, requiring good planning and the ability to adapt quickly when reconfiguring infrastructure to avoid deficits.

Ships can be designed to repel insurgent invasions, but this is a system that could have done without. While it would be nice to see companies try to stop the destruction of another world, in the end it would do little positive. Ships are expensive, cumbersome to build, and their impracticality cannot be justified. You can't even select multiple ships; you have to order them one at a time. But if the battle is simply a matter of clicking enemies, that is not so much of a problem.

I relied primarily on ground turrets to protect all my wealth and, to a lesser extent, my employees. If you want to destroy a rebel camp, you need ships, but it is not compulsory to wipe out the rebels. But it is not compulsory to wipe out the insurgents. It is easy to defeat the insurgents, but once you have done that, there is no reason at all to keep the ships. I don't think it's well thought out.

What bothers me is that a lot of effort must have gone into designing this layer. There are many different hulls, dedicated shipyards, and even a loose progression system that can unlock more ship devices in the technology tree. All the design work and testing could have been better used to flesh out the building interiors and production chain. The actual city builder-ish part; Brace Yourself Games cut some really interesting things from the roadmap.

There is a Zen mode to eliminate insurgents, but Industries of Titan's main focus is the campaign. It is poor. To gain a seat on the council, you must occupy several corporate sectors, but you can only do so by conquering other sectors. It takes about five missions to reach the end. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it is a painstaking task. Whether it is an arid map with constant sandstorms or a cold map with rebel strongholds, the experience is much the same.

What is different in Industries of Titan is that getting a seat on the council has nothing to do with running a successful business. Instead, they must accomplish arbitrary and sometimes completely pointless goals in order to earn stars and move up in rank. A Bronze rank will get you through a mission, but as you rise in rank, you are awarded more gratuities, which you can use as bonuses in the next mission.

It is hard to describe how much I hate these goals and how much they ruin the pace of the game. Every mission I've played has been artificially stretched long after I've already designed an efficient and sustainable colony and crushed the rebels." Yeah, you make a lot of money and all your employees love you. And because these goals are predetermined, you are rarely prompted to solve problems related to your situation. You can skip some of the goals even if you're aiming for the highest rank, but you still have to devote time to a litany of utterly ridiculous demands.

To complete the final mission, I ended up building 14 influence-producing obelisks, even though I had almost always reached my influence limit. And of course, those obelisks demanded energy, so I had to expand my infrastructure to construct a lot of useless buildings that I would never use as I was trying to finish the campaign. I was able to join the council because I jumped through some silly hoops, but that cost me a few victories. They are a bunch of rich dicks laughing at the guy with the obelisk.

Industries of Titan may have had an unpleasant ending, but much of my time was spent content to tinker with my city's infrastructure and solve logistical conundrums. It is very satisfying to enter this zone, sit back and tweak and expand. But by failing to develop the initially appealing ideas and instead imposing disastrous battles and exhausting goals, the game has lost its way. Eventually, to my relief, I submitted my resignation.