DSS 2: War Industry Review Summary

Last updated: 2025-11-01
  • Highly engaging and enjoyable gameplay.
  • Charming visuals and pleasing audio.
  • Clear, helpful in-game tutorial.
  • Expansive grand strategy RTS gameplay.
  • Cumbersome micromanagement; weak automation systems.
  • Difficult user experience; steep learning curve.
DSS 2: War Industry header

Emotions

What players like:

Common complaints:

Gameplay feedback:

Performance notes:

Recommendations:

Other player notes:

Review evidence

Why players say this

What players like

Highly Engaging and Enjoyable: Players find the game deeply fun, addictive, and easy to get into, often leading to longer play sessions than intended. They appreciate its unique blend of depth and accessibility, with high replayability due to varied matches. It offers significant value for its price.

Charming Visuals & Pleasing Audio: Players appreciate the game's wholesome visual style, vibrant colors, and cute designs, with some positive comparisons to Settlers. Battles look cool with meaty sound effects, and the overall ambient audio design is pleasing and non-annoying.

Clear and Helpful Tutorial: The game features an effective tutorial that successfully introduces core mechanics. It teaches enough to get started, making the initial learning experience smooth and accessible for new players.

Expansive RTS Grand Strategy: The game excels as an RTS/grand strategy hybrid, featuring massive maps, enormous battles, and deep production chains. It's praised for its innovative concept and satisfying mix of macro empire management and micro-level RTS gameplay, offering substantial strategic depth.

Active Developer & Bright Future: The developer is highly praised for being attentive, responsive to feedback, and committed to long-term support. A clear and promising roadmap for future content and improvements instills confidence in the game's continued growth.

Common complaints

Cumbersome micromanagement; weak automation: The game demands extensive micromanagement, especially with multiple cities and resource chains, becoming tedious. Current city automation is ineffective or lacking in options, failing to properly manage development or specific production tasks, forcing players to resort to external notes.

Difficult user experience; steep learning curve: Players find controls, menus, and general operability confusing and difficult, leading to a steep learning curve. The initial game setup, starting with pre-built settlements, and a short tutorial further hinder new player integration.

Presence of various bugs: Players report numerous bugs, ranging from general issues to game-breaking ones encountered early on. Specific problems include armies getting stuck, untargetable city guards, and an inability to capture certain areas.

Suboptimal UI design: The user interface is described as unintuitive and needing improvement. Specific issues include a large left-side menu that covers a significant portion of the screen and is persistently visible.

Basic battle and army controls: Battle mechanics are considered simple, and army behavior can be unintelligent. Issues include unrealistic unit movement on water, armies acting dumb, unwatchable ground-level battles, and a lack of options to edit army composition from a zoomed-out map.

Gameplay and performance

Expansive map dimensions: Players consistently observe that the game's map feels very large, even when playing on default or intentionally small size settings, suggesting a vast world to explore or manage.

Basic visual aesthetic: One player described the game's aesthetic as basic, suggesting that the graphical presentation might not be its strongest feature. This point is based on limited and somewhat vague feedback.

Optimize game performance: The singular piece of feedback points to a general need for better game optimization. However, it lacks specific details regarding which areas of the game are underperforming or what issues players are encountering, making it difficult to act upon precisely. This summary is based on limited and low-quality feedback.

Recommendations

Mixed Recommendations Overall: Players offer a mix of strong recommendations for fans of specific genres like 4X, city-building, RTS, and Total War, citing massive scale and automation. However, some reviewers express hesitation in recommending it to newcomers or those unfamiliar with the game, and note that it's 'worth it despite issues' without specifying what those issues are.

Other review notes

Promising game needs future updates: Players recognize the game's strong potential and are willing to invest time, despite its current early state. Many are eagerly awaiting future patches and content expansions, believing these updates are crucial for the game to fully mature and achieve greatness.

Request in-game editor, workshop: There is clear demand for features that support user-generated content, specifically an in-game faction editor and integration with a workshop. Players believe these tools would significantly enhance the sandbox experience and extend the game's longevity.

Improve troop management UI: Feedback suggests the user interface, particularly for troop creation and general management, could benefit from improved clarity and objectivity. A more streamlined and intuitive system would enhance player usability and understanding.

Review tutorial engagement: One player opted to skip the tutorial, which could indicate a need to assess its effectiveness or appeal. While based on limited feedback, this suggests checking if the tutorial adequately prepares players or if an alternative learning path is preferred.