Kapital: Sparks of Revolution, made by an indie developer Lapovich Team, is a city builder and management sim with three factions for you to try to appease. The game’s demo was available for free for some time on Steam, and Kapital‘s release is planned for 2022.
We gave the game a try, and here is what we have to say about the demo.
Plot
The game places you in an ambiguous setting of a city that has been destroyed by war. And we do mean destroyed, because aside from (surprisingly) the city hall, there is not one building left for people to live in. Your goal is to restore the city while satisfying the needs of three different factions – that is, nobles, bourgeois, and workers. People will start dying from hunger and exposure fairly soon, so you need to act fast!
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Tutorial
The demo starts out by holding your hand, explaining the key mechanics of the game, but the hand-holding slowly becomes less pronounced. Overall, the tutorial is a good opportunity to learn about the majority of Kapital’s features. They are introduced through a mixture of tasks you need to perform, and through visual novel-esque conversations with the representatives of the three factions.
Gameplay
The gameplay is quite standard for the genre, with a few tweaks that make Kapital stand out and demonstrate its personality. You are going to build facilities for people to leave, work, eat, and rest in. You will pass acts to open up new opportunities for development. You will trade, collect, produce, and manage resources. Overall, you are expected to do all the typical activities of a city builder.
The twist is that, as the demo claims, you cannot satisfy every faction, as they tend to react differently to the same acts. If they grow unhappy, the factions will also riot, destroying the city hall.
Depending on the faction, you might pacify them before they do that, but it is very inconvenient to deal with rioting people. While it may seem reasonable to choose one faction to focus on, all of them will be of use in developing your city.
Demo
The demo has the typical city-builder lapses in logic. The large city hall stands there unused as people die of exposure. The nobles are too noble to eat with the workers, so they would rather die without eating.
That said, you do not have to break immersion by thinking too much about it. The game has a decent number of acts and buildings to work through and figure out a strategy of restoring the city after a war, which is justifiably hard. With few resources and discontent people, the game should offer quite a challenge.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, Kapital‘s demo does not seem to be available now. Playing it showed us a game with a unique personality and potential to become a very interesting city builder.
We will be able to play the full version soon, with the release date set in 2022.
Our Rating
Story
Graphics
Controls
