This is a chill make-your-own fun sandbox factory building game based on pure mechanics. The game play is basically: Here's some basic resources and some increasing complex tasks to achieve; go figure it out.
It might be best to describe what's missing or not included in the game play as the absence of some mechanics is surprising (not a criticism):
- There's no story, narrative,This is a chill make-your-own fun sandbox factory building game based on pure mechanics. The game play is basically: Here's some basic resources and some increasing complex tasks to achieve; go figure it out.
It might be best to describe what's missing or not included in the game play as the absence of some mechanics is surprising (not a criticism):
- There's no story, narrative, or central conflict central to the game play. It's just a sandbox of resources and tools that lets you build what every you want. There is guidance and objectives at first, but it amounts to "build the requested shape" with the resources available.
-The game is not really resource constrained, including time limits. You have basically unlimited resources to design, build, test and optimize a solution at your own pace.
-There's no explicit fail state other than failure to progress to the next level. You can't die or get in a place you can't recover from. You can always wipe the board and start over at any time without restarting the game or resetting your level progress.
-There are no scores, weights, or rankings in the game and you're not judged or compared to other players unless you go out of your way to find it outside of the game.
Pros:
- A chill, self-directed experience. You get out what you put in and it can be as shallow or deep as you want based on you interest and engagement with the mechanics.
- There's a free web demo to get you hooked. If you're unsure if you might like it, you can try before you buy.
- It's a surprisingly good educational game for anyone interested in engineering or computer science topics. It teaches a whole bunch of good skills in logistics, planning, programming, computational logic, process pipe lining, routing and placement of factories. It does all of this in an emergent, self-directed way without explicit being an educational game. The game gives you a bunch of engineering tools and a problem to apply them too, and lets you figure out the rest. It's recommended for any would-be engineer interested in programming, electrical engineering, printed circuit board design, or integrated circuit design.
- It's an open-source game published on Github. You can participate in the development and/or modify the game if you're interested.
Cons:
- Performance is an issue with large factories. You can't just brute force build factories due to instabilities in the game engine. This is perhaps (unintentionally) one of the limiting factors or resources in the game. On more than one occasion, I had to redesign and simplify some large factories to get them to run without crashing the game.
- There's kind of 2 games in one: There's a large pivot and change in game play mechanics when you reach the endgame/freeplay mode that the game doesn't fully prepare you for. Using the wires layer turns it into a whole other metagame.
- I wish the game forced you to engage more with the wire parts as they were unlocked.
- I wish you could "mirror" parts in addition to rotating them. It would open up a whole other level of optimization to laying out and optimizing factories.
- OCD trigger. If you're obsessed with optimizing things or achieving the "best" design, this will drive you crazy and eat huge amounts of time as you iteratively improve your designs. I'm kind of glad they don't have an on-line competitive mode.
- The in-game tutorials are a little lacking when it comes to explaining how some parts work. It's best to visit the wiki and on-line communities instead.… Expand
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