A strategy game about reclaiming an overgrown megastructure, with excellent long-range planning and an interface that fights you the whole way.
The premise is strong: a kilometre-tall structure has been abandoned to plant life for two centuries, and you are reclaiming it floor by floor against rival crews doing the same. Vertical territory, contested supply lines, and a slow creeping growth mechanic that undoes anything you leave unattended. On paper this is exactly the kind of design we spend our time looking for.
The long game is where it delivers. Plans laid twenty turns out actually resolve, factions differ in ways that change your approach rather than your colour scheme, and the growth clock forces you to choose between holding ground and taking it. When Overgrowth Protocol works, it produces the specific satisfaction of a scheme paying off long after you had stopped watching it.
Then there is the interface, which is close to hostile. Supply throughput — the single number your entire strategy depends on — lives three menus deep and is never surfaced on the main view. Unit tooltips round their values, which matters enormously when a margin is tight. We kept a notebook, and we should not have had to.
The difficulty compounds the problem, lurching upward at two specific points with no signalling, and the multiplayer suite is a thin two-map afterthought. Redline Assembly has built something with real depth here. It has also built a wall in front of it, and that wall is going to cost this game most of the audience it deserves.
By hour forty the interface stops being an obstacle, because you have memorised what it will not tell you. That is not a defence of the design — a game should not require you to keep its most important numbers on paper — but it does mean the strategy underneath eventually gets to breathe.
Reviewed on PC, PS5, Xbox. Play time is logged by the reviewer and published with every score — see how we score for the full rubric.
