GameSpot's early access reviews evaluate unfinished games that are nonetheless available for purchase by the public. While the games in question are not considered finished by their creators, you may still devote money, time, and bandwidth for the privilege of playing them before they are complete. The review below critiques a work in progress, and represents a snapshot of the game at the time of the review's publication.

Were you to staple The Sims to Banished and throw in a dash of Lovecraft, the result would probably look a lot like Clockwork Empires. Built upon a loose amalgam of city management and life simulator, this Neo-Victorian strategy game aims to minimize micromanagement and give you a more personal connection to your citizens. Regrettably, in its unfinished early access state, Clockwork Empires fails utterly and consistently. The obnoxious interface is intrusive and cumbersome, most of your citizens need to be carefully huddled and followed to ensure they do what they’re asked, and almost nothing is properly automated.

In the current release, every game begins with 17 colonists: three soldiers and fourteen laborers. Your colonists are organized into work groups, and you can assign them general tasks that they attempt to complete. I say "general," because any task more specific than “forestry” or “construction” isn’t allowed. Ostensibly, this simplicity keeps micromanagement from getting too ridiculous, but in practice, it’s endlessly frustrating. One of the first structures you’ll want to build is a house, and just filling is with furniture is a pain. You need to harvest trees, gather and refine lumber, and then prep it for transportation.

That process alone requires that one work group on construction, one on forestry, one on carpentry, and one on transportation--which is to say, almost all of your starting workers must get to immediate work. The bustle wouldn’t matter much if it those laborers did their assigned tasks, but more often than not, they faff about, confused and uncoordinated. Sometimes they take on random tasks that haven’t been delegated. In one instance, I caught a villager gathering “exotic caviar” when she wasn’t supposed to, prompting an attack from fishpeople. My soldiers were off hunting aurochs and didn’t respond to the crisis as quickly as they should have. Five people died.

Avoiding these headaches would be easy if Clockwork Empires let you at least occasionally take direct control of citizens. Instead, selecting them gives you a breakdown of their most recent experiences, goals, and personality quirks. That’s one of the game’s biggest draws: each citizen has a working set of aspirations and relationships to tie him to the community and motivate his achievements. Unfortunately, the system hasn’t been fully developed. At most, a person that’s feeling a bit murderous, if left unwatched, will start killing her fellow colonists. Gaslamp claims that when the game is complete, there will be a lot more depth to this system, but for now, the spectrum of humanity represented consists merely of “normal” and “serial killer.”

Gathering resources is about the only part of the game that fully works, but there’s not a lot to do with 10 tons of malachite. Technically, you’re supposed to be able to refine that into all manner of early industrial goods, but that mechanism doesn’t always work like it should. No, instead I found it satisfying to aimlessly clear forests and mine all of the surface minerals and ores. Seeing the map go from cluttered to clear offers at least some concrete feeling of progression. That joy quickly fades, however, when you realize that your people aren’t working anymore because they’ve decided to eat raw meat they have stumbled upon. Then you wonder why the cooks aren’t making that into some roast beef, and you discover that they are nowhere to be found. Eventually, the people will build, harvest, and refine what they need. In several hours of play, however, across multiple games, I couldn’t get them to finish all of the beds in the very first house I built. Without fail, they’d be somewhere I don’t want them to be, doing something I didn’t want them to do.

Clockwork Empires is rough even for an early access game. The themes are all there, and the fundamentals work, but the player-facing facets are so rough-hewn it’s almost impossible to appreciate all that’s going on behind the scenes. At this stage, the game is aggressively mediocre.