This is a weird one to recommend, I saw it on the Jingle Jam bundle and thought why not give it a try. Turns out its actually an incredibly deep management simulation styled like a town simulation game, with a fairly wide range of things to manage and consider.
When we first booted this game up, both myself and my partners had exactly the same thought: “This looks like someone’s ‘My first Unity’ game.” And stylistically, sorta yeah, the menus have that certain feel to it, and the graphics while intricate occasionally feel a tiny smidge out of place, but eventually you reach a point where you start seeing the buildings not by their presentation but by their function. This produces that, This produces happiness.
There are a few things that I’m not entirely sure about, such as having to keep town production and houses bunched up together, but from a presentation perspective that all makes sense so I can overlook it. Some of the campaign maps are right arse to work around though, hills are a nightmare and it really does produce a very fun challenge about how to route belts and stuff.
There are a few tutorial popups and help windows about how some things work, but a lot of mechanics are kinda left to you to figure out. The campaign maps all start off from a relatively functioning town though it will need a lot of doing up in order to get them thriving, but they’ll also start with good examples on various mechanics, like how to set up basic train lines, how to use mana pipes to recharge things, etc.
I’m probably going to be spending a couple dozen more hours with this game before I put it down, which is a couple dozen more than I thought initially but I’m definitely plesently surprised with the quality of the gameplay here, and absolutely do recommend it to anyone else interested in factory based automation games.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/860890 £15.49
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/factory-town £16.56
Itch.io: https://easmussen.itch.io/factory-town $20.00
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