Wild West Pioneers: they sell you a story, you come for the sawmill

"They say the West is made of gold, hope and vengeance. Most who follow the trail are chasing one of them, and most don't find any."

That is the first line of the store page, and it is a fine line. It promises a western.

What you are going to do, for the first eight hours, is place cabins next to a sawmill while watching a stack of planks.

The two are not incompatible. But you need to know which one is the game.

Who made this

EmpireCraft Studios, a Polish outfit specialising in city builders with survival elements, with Toplitz Productions publishing.

That second name matters. Toplitz is the German-Austrian publisher behind the Dynasty series, and the Dynasty series has a very recognisable signature: slow, serious building games where a character's personal survival mixes with running a community, with a thicket of an interface and progression that never tries to flatter you.

Wild West Pioneers sits squarely in that school. If you have enjoyed losing dozens of hours to it, you are at home. If you find the school austere, this game will not convert you.

It launches today in early access, on Steam but also on GOG and the Epic Games Store.

The loop, for real

Timber towards gold. Makeshift shelters towards an actual town. In between, two things to hold at once: production and your people.

Production follows the genre's grammar. A raw resource, a building that transforms it, a downstream need that demands the finished product. Nothing new, but the game has the good sense to make distance painful. The West is empty, and an interesting deposit is rarely next to your town square. So every expansion is a trade-off between how rich a site is and what it costs to reach it.

The settlers are the other half. You have to care for them, not merely count them. And that is where the game edges towards survival: a badly fed, badly housed or badly treated colonist is not a statistic going down, it is a production chain stopping.

The story, and the problem with the story

The game insists on it: you follow a narrative full of danger while exploring an unforgiving frontier, and the search for your family sits at the centre.

That is a rare ambition in this genre and I want to give it credit. Most city builders settle for a tutorial dressed up as narrative.

But as things stand, the story advances through objectives, and the objectives look a great deal like what you were going to do anyway. Build this, reach that level, produce so much of a resource. The lost family exists as a motif, not yet as tension. You do not feel any urgency to find them, you tick a box.

That is the sort of thing early access can fix, because the structure is there and what is missing is writing rather than technology. I am recording it today as a gap, not a conviction.

What snags

The interface is busy, and it demands a learning phase the game supports poorly. The first hours go on hunting for where you read a piece of information that should be right in front of you.

The pace is very slow at the start. Defensible, standard for the genre, but go in knowing it: the first two hours give you almost nothing.

The art direction is competent and impersonal. The visuals are modern and clean, exactly as advertised, and you look in vain for the shot, the light or the building that would make you say "that is Wild West Pioneers." The western is an extraordinarily image-rich setting, and the game uses rather few of those images.

And it needs repeating, because this is the honesty point: this is day one of early access. The foundation is solid, the late game is thin, and the narrative is a building site.

My best moment was when I moved my sawmill. Not built, moved. I had laid out my entire town around a deposit I eventually exhausted, and I had to accept demolishing an arrangement that worked in order to reach the one that would work next. A game that makes you tear down your own work because the map changed its mind is a game that has understood something about the frontier.

Are you on the side of planned towns or the side of towns that sprawl any which way? We argue about it on the InsertCoins Discord.