Stario: Haven Tower is an immensely satisfying city-builder game that builds on solid foundations

You can hardly swing a cat on the Steam store without hitting a dozen different simulation or city-builder games, but if you’re a fan of the genre, this one deserves your attention. Out now in Early Access, Stario: Haven Tower is an uplifting (sorry) city-builder that aims for the skies, and it uses a uniquely vertical approach and some smart mechanics to keep you hooked.

You start out with basic foundations in a sand-swept kingdom named the Sand Zone, and must grow vertically by placing layers and managing your tower as you go. Resource management is essential, as you place dew or dust collectors on your tower to collect water and dust, respectively, and then use plantations or farms to grow crops. As you grab more resources to build more layers, your trusty Towertizens living in the tower move items between those layers, using porters, and later, some helpful items like pipes and balloons. 

Need more citizens? Place more huts to power your collectors and farms. However, you will have to decide which jobs to prioritize and how best to allocate your troops. Then, you also need more to work as porters as you grow upwards, so you continue moving your resources between the gradually increasing layers. The higher you go, the more difficult it gets to balance those many elements perfectly, but the more satisfying it gets to see things working. 

There’s a really steady progression system on display here, with a large research tree waiting for you. Once you’ve built a research station or two and allocated some workers to staff them, you can use your many amassed resources and a bit of time to develop new decorations, new farms, and some great new perks. This steady addition of new buildings works well alongside the gradual expansion of mechanics to keep you constantly moving between goals. 

It took us a while to realise a new farm needed wheat, which hinted I could change a farm to produce wheat instead of potatoes. Similarly, a later perk demanded glass bricks, which reminded us to build a glass brick factory. With city-builders, this sort of progression system can often feel overwhelming or punishing, but here things seemed to move smoothly throughout, with every new layer you build bringing an exciting new element instead of a jarring problem. 

There are consequences here, as the world often brings desert storms and other natural disasters, which degrade your buildings and threaten the people living in your tower. Then, you must consider stability when placing your building on the few available walls outside of your tower. You can’t just build outwards indefinitely, so it pays to consider the available space and the needs of your citizens with every additional layer, not to mention the best positioning and shape of each new layer you place. 

Eventually, I built so many new farms that nobody was working on the dew collectors, so I had to shift some workers’ jobs. Then, after steadily losing buildings to the sand, the tower wasn’t building repair kits quickly enough. In these first few hours, there was nothing truly difficult, but instead, the game worked at a pleasant but engaging pace that worked well alongside the atmospheric music and chill vibes. 

I’m a sucker for city-builders that not only give you this level of control over all of the minutiae, but also offer smart connections between the many mechanics. Once you start building pipes or balloons to move resources between layers, you can really see the potential for massive towers with widely connected systems all singing together. There are even special layers that fit together in unique ways, and it feels like there is a huge wealth of other elements just waiting to be discovered in the desert to reward your hard work. 

There is some variation between the layers as well, which demands a bit more planning. As you move upwards from the Sand Zone to the Mist Zone, different farms and resources like quartz become available, and you have a whole new series of elements to consider. Meanwhile, the sky itself is populated with flying jellyfish, stingrays, or turtles that gently occupy the world around you, adding so much gentle worldbuilding as you merrily go about your mission. 

With so many elements, there’s scope for Stario: Haven Tower to get overwhelming, but alongside the slow rollout of mechanics, the title has a really smart UI that shows the resources being produced on every layer, and any potential deficiencies. Just swinging the camera around the tower to place more units in gaps and admire your handiwork is fun, though I hope the finished product has the option for a vertical monitor mode, especially with so much free space on either side of the action. 

Altogether, Stario: Haven Tower feels well-designed and impressively stacked with mechanics, and the best praise I can give is that we didn’t want to stop playing. It remains to be seen how well the game can keep players’ attention beyond those first few hours, but what’s here is already a captivating city-builder with a unique twist and some fantastic aesthetic choices. Even after a few hours, the time just felt like it was melting away, and I look forward to building our tower even higher.