Realindustry

I have a real love/hate relationship with this game. It's a great idea wrapped in a hard to use UI filled with very strange and somewhat baffling design choices. I'm still playing basically forcing myself to get through to the end, but I would not recommend it, it just isn't fun as anything but a tedious clicker until you're nearly done with the game. If it was in early access, maybe this would be a cautious recommend, but only after playing the demo thoroughly. But it's a full release game, so it's definitely thumbs down. You build one of each building, and each building will have multiple processing lines available. For example, an oil refinery has processing petroleum into motor products, lubricant, or several other products, each as a separate line. Initially with colonists you can automate most or all of the lines in a building to run in parallel, up to where you run out of colonists. Even with the recent change to increase colonists, you run out very quickly. So maybe you can automate all the steps to get steel, but then you also need 50 other products to keep moving forward. So you're hand crafting those other 50. Why the artificial limitation? Then you get halfway throu…

Massively enjoyed the demo of this a few months back, but I feel like the dev has made some changes/additions that have lessened my enjoyment of it. There seems to be far less focus on automation and far more manual crafting. Systems have just changed ever so slightly, sadly.

This game is *BAD* from a design perspective and getting worse as it goes on. It was an incremental but not a very good one. People wanted it to be a factory game, which it is not. You simply click your way to success. The factory part of the game is very high level, but always a bother. You neither have the colonists, nor the automation you want. Why bother when you just click your wait to level 10? I don't even understand why there is automation really? Also, I don't think he even knows how to proceed with the game. I can't stress this enough, this isn't an automation game. It is and isn't an incremental. I wish I could get through to the author but he only hears what he wants to hear. This is a word of warning for people planning on making game entirely by AI. It isn't the AI, it is bad human design. You can't AI that away. It was a poorly conceived incremental that went horribly wrong somewhere and isn't worth playing.

The game is ok and has a bit of interesting lore apart from production chains. But automatization is quite a problem because interface and usability is quite poor. Chemical plant is the deepest circle of hell together with some other production buildings with many recipes. You just waste a lot of time searching for needed recipe to tweak it a bit. With 30+ active recipes it becomes hell. You just cannot distinguish what is produced by a blocks at a glance. And it lags like AAA project built on Ureal Engine 5. Another problem is finding out what resources gone deficit in automation panel. You have something like 100 resources produced and no sorting or filtering. Inventory tab is not a real helper here too. No sorting or filtering of recipes and resources anywhere. No icons of produced items where they are most needed. Jumping block heights in automation. And so on. Game wants your eyes to feel pain and it accomplishes this evil deed. But I've spent 39 hours there. And finished the game with automation of at least 85% of most used resources. And I actually liked it more than hated. After some patches it will be more playable.

This game is not there yet, at best you can say it is an early access game with balancing problems. If the developer manages to balance progression better (especially the amount of colonists you get for the first 4-5 tech tiers), and polish the experience a it more, i.e. scrolling feels clunky with the need for the mouse mouse wheel, it would have worked better if you could grab the background behind the cards and just pull with left click. Polish, balance, and just raising the general quality of this product could possibly turn it into a thumbs up.

I definitely recommend this game. Its very casual and I accidentally played it for 4 hours on a Saturday... I cautiously purchased the game after reading the criticisms about colonist shortages and learned very quickly that is a mechanic to force you to REDUCE your productions, not maximize them. Then I wrote a guide for the numb skulls who thought it was a fault in the game. . . Please use my guide if you think there arent enough colonists.