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Games like Tropico have for years put you in the shoes of a nation’s leader, giving you the power to control the destiny of your people and your growing country. Kaiserpunk is looking to provide one of the most dynamic and visually-stunning takes on this formula, as the promising city-building strategy game lets you rewrite the geopolitical history of the 20th century as you go. The bad news is that it’s not out for another three months. The good news is that you can play it this weekend, thanks to a “massive” new playtest.
Allowing you to create your own city state, the earlier stages of Kaiserpunk sees you setting up factories and infrastructure to begin growing your population and resources. However, greater ambitions will soon emerge, and you’ll have to conquer neighboring nations to go from microstate to sprawling empire – a lot of the time, that’ll be by force. That all sounds grand, and its alternate-history 1900s setting is a great premise for a city-building strategy game. Kaiserpunk already threw a playtest earlier this year before unfortunately delaying its release date to 2025. However, developer Overseer Games has been using that extra time extremely wisely, and the game’s second playtest promises to be a “true window” into what the final product will look and play like.
So, what’s new in this playtest? “In short: everything,” the developer jests in a new announcement post. “Kaiserpunk has evolved into a polished and feature-rich experience. We’ve added brand-new systems, reworked old ones, and addressed the feedback from our first playtest.”
In its long list of changes, you’ll find new social pillars that align your nation’s ideology, heritages that let you pick from a German, Western, or Russian origin, new and better optimized maps, an overhauled tutorial, a diplomacy system, and so much more. Oh, and as a bit of a vexillology nerd, the new feature that lets you create your own flag for your nation has totally sold me.
The amount of progress that’s been made from its first playtest is pretty impressive, and Overseer really wasn’t kidding when it said the game was truly “feature-rich” now.
The new playtest for Kaiserpunk runs from Friday, November 29 to Tuesday, December 3. It’s free to sign-up and is a valuable opportunity for Overseer to gather more feedback as it approaches Kaiserpunk’s February 27 release date.
For some other similar experiences that you can play once the playtest is all wrapped up, head over to our expert recommendations for the best city building games and best 4X games.
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