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Rise of Industry 2 Review (PS5)

in Review
Ben Newtonby Ben Newton
September 26, 2025

Take a trip back a few short decades to what many may consider to be the height of unchecked capitalism – 1980s America. In Rise of Industry 2, you’re a junior executive proving your corporate worth by mastering a complex web of industry to meet the increasing demands of investors.

While Rise of Industry 2 nails cozy but in-depth management, 80s corporate aesthetic, and overall vibe, difficulties effectively translating an information dense genre to consoles and a number of bugs in the review copy we received, ultimately holds the game back from fully working in its console iteration.

Time is money, friend!

Rise of Industry 2 offers a decent tutorial, that demonstrates the games core mechanics before unleashing you upon the 15 campaign scenarios and a sandbox mode. It’s in these modes that you’ll really be presented with an opportunity to get to grips with everything Rise of Industry 2 has to offer. This complexity provides a steep but short learning curve and one that is quite satisfying to progress through as you unlock new technologies and the associated industries to profit from.

Early on, much of the difficulty comes from managing a limited cashflow while needing to build and grow your production chains for profitability. Quick and risky growth can lead to quick profits, allowing you to exponentially grow while the money flows but slow down at your own peril – stagnant income can quickly cause progress in a scenario to grind to a halt.

A typical scenario will see you in an area with limited resources and task you with growing specific industries to take advantage of the resources available. Production starts relatively simple, for example mining ores to forge into metal for use in other industries and grows in complexity to encompass more profitable goods such as cars and furniture and all of the stages in between, where you’ll need to manage a delicate balance of contracts to keep the required goods and resources coming in and surplus sold.

Complexity is a key word for Rise of Industry 2. There’s a lot on offer; that’s a big part of the appeal and it’s easy to get absorbed into building a rich web of industrial complexes, but that’s also Rise of Industry 2’s biggest pitfall – not necessarily the complexity itself, but the difficulty of balancing everything available in the game in a way that is easily manageable with the limited inputs available to console.

As industry sprawls, so too does profit…

The large number of available research, the interconnected web of goods production, financial information and business relationships is just the tip of the iceberg of things to navigate as your grow your empire, Rise of Industry 2 does the best it can manage how all of this is accessed and interacted with, though I often found that some of the information I wanted wasn’t clearly available.

In many instances, production would frequently hit some kind of bottleneck that would cause a contract delivery to be missed, and it was never exactly clear what the issue was. The notifications received advising of this never said what had caused the issue unless it was a scripted event, so I’d spend some time trying to figure out the cause, tracing production and ensuring my math had been correct on each stage of production and delivery – sometimes this would do the trick, and I would discover in my blind focus on setting up a new production chain had allowed a warehouse to fill up with a resource or a delivery hadn’t been adjusted to cover increased production, but equally as often it would for all intents and purposes appear as though everything was in order and the correct amount of goods/resources were being delivered where they needed to be for a contract delivery to take place but something, somewhere, had gone out of sync and thrown the whole thing out causing every delivery to be missed, which would inevitably cause income to crash and require a complete refresh of deliveries and contracts to get back on course. Something that while super satisfying to rectify and reap the monetary reward at first, become increasingly tedious as production chains grew larger and more complex.

The way the UI is managed on console is a fairly standard one, used in a wide range of strategy and management ports. Using the D-Pad will allow you to navigate through different areas of the UI to then drill down into the required screens. It’s a clunky system, and one that can easily fall down as more and more information is provided to a player, as is the case with Rise of Industry 2. In my playthrough, I often found it easy to lose track of which area of the UI I had selected, got stuck on notifications or just had a difficult time selecting the specific part of a menu I was after, something I found to be exacerbated by the UI scale. I often found text to be a bit small and difficult to read, there isn’t a huge number of settings available, with the only option affecting this being UI scale – anything larger than the default scale (200%) would cause areas of the UI to overlap rendering the change somewhat pointless.

It ended up just being quite fiddly, and as scenarios progressed and the amount of information available grew with more contracts, complexes and resource chains I became inundated with notifications and menus became cluttered with more things to navigate. Building often surprisingly proved to be one of the easier aspects to navigate, with the build menu having its own button to access but also suffered from clutter at later stages of scenario. Building facilities was quick and easy to do, but fine details could often be tedious to manage using a controller.

More complex menus, like the research menu, could be tricky to navigate to the sections within

Gremlins

Alongside the clunkiness of navigating the information dense UI, I encountered a number of bugs that primarily affected the game’s UI.

After first installing the game, I encountered a bug in the tutorial where I was unable to progress through it as information pop-ups were not able to be closed. Eventually after a couple of re-installs and restarts of the game I was able to start closing tutorial pop ups by navigating onto another UI element via the D-Pad, but this would need to be done for every single pop up that I encountered.

Once in the game proper, I frequently would encounter an issue where overlay elements would remain visible in the game despite no longer being on that function, for example the building highlights when selecting which buildings to deliver goods to and from would remain visible after a delivery had been set up.

At other times UI elements would seemingly not respond to button inputs and in one instance I was unable to quit out of the game to the main menu, with the game freezing, removing all textures and only allowing me to open and close the menu screen but unable to save or exit the scenario.

For me, it was a situation of death by a thousand cuts. I probably wouldn’t have batted much of an eye at these issues if it wasn’t for the frequency in which I encountered them in an already cluttered and sometimes finicky UI.

Graphical issues were common, such as this one which prevented even exiting the game.

BOOM or BUST

Ultimately, I did for the most part enjoy the time I spent with Rise of Industry 2. I love a good strategy or management game, and Rise of Industry 2 offers a robust experience.

There’s a challenging gameplay loop that keeps you on your toes if you let things slip out of your control but also not being so challenging that any mistake will ruin your prospects. The simple, somewhat cartoony art style complements the 80s vibe and allows the management elements to really shine on their own, while the complexity and depth help to keep things fresh and interesting as you unlock new industries.

On the other hand, the game often struggles to effectively present the detail and range of options in a way that is easily navigable, causing many elements of the UI to be cumbersome and some micro-management elements tedious to navigate. It’s fair to say that these elements were frequent and frustrating, and while it may be worth sticking it out for fans of the genre, if you’re not seeking out what Rise of Industry 2 has to offer, you might find yourself having a tough time.

Ben Newton Contributor

Ben is a big nerd, and has been gaming for as long as he can remember. His earliest memories being of playing DOOM with his Dad in the late 90's and he has recently been enjoying rediscovering all of the games he couldn't afford as a kid. His passion for gaming is shared with a passion for writing that he hopes to share by contributing to Smash Jump.

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  • Ben Newton
    Contributor

    Ben is a big nerd, and has been gaming for as long as he can remember. His earliest memories being of playing DOOM with his Dad in the late 90's and he has recently been enjoying rediscovering all of the games he couldn't afford as a kid. His passion for gaming is shared with a passion for writing that he hopes to share by contributing to Smash Jump.

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