Recent reviews by Charred

I just spent 20 minutes holding down left click on a story boss

Factory Town is a brighter take on factory style games. While Factorio has a moodier, industrial art style, Factory Town uses vibrant colors and sunlight to really brighten up the mood of the game. This is reflected in the gameplay, too — Factory Town feels much more casual-friendly than Factorio, and I say that as a good thing.

The game starts by harvesting trees using workers which are reminiscent of Warcraft, simply harvesting wood and bringing it to your base. These workers are used in the beginning of the game instead of conveyor belts, which is an interesting take on the "factory" genre formula. If this seems messy, don't worry, you get conveyor belts fairly soon in the game.

The place where this game REALLY shines is the 3D aspect. Looking at the game's screenshots, it seems like a mostly 2D game. But at some point in the game you will realize you have to build belts that overlap without mixing materials and you need to build in 3D to make the equivalent of Factorio's underground belt. Then you might realize that you can place buildings on top of each other using scaffold blocks, and you can build towers of buildings that make a product, allowing for more ground space for other buildings. This opens up the game for beautifully complex systems, and terribly disgusting messes.

The 3D aspect is also partially the game's weakness. Building in 3D can be kind of difficult, naturally. Additionally the natural hills are kind of annoying before you get used to it - making buildings will automatically place scaffolding so they are on even terrain, but some paths and belts will not place correctly on terrain unless you manually place a scaffold or flatten it out.

Overall, Factory Town is an excellent game and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys this genre. It is more laid-back but there are still plenty of things to do for people who are obsessed with raising their efficiency. The controls take some getting used to, but it is worth it because the rest of the game is great.

It's not very fun to play against. The Ruler Reactions make them decently difficult, which is good, but it just feels so bad to play against. You have to avoid making actions and moving because they rulers will run around and kill your dudes just because you moved some soldier. It just feels bad to lose to an enemy who gets a ton of attacks.

It does include a decent amount of nice Dr. Vahlen story though. If you liked Vahlen in XCOM EU/EW you'll probably find this interesting.

It was really fun at first, but got boring quickly.

The combat and design is all quite fun. Randomness keeps it decently exciting, but it suffers from being too reliant on randomness. There is very limited progression, and beating a specific dungeon is reliant on draw. Despite the fact that you own a "guild" and can expand it, you don't actually upgrade your characters, the only purpose of building more buildings is for more characters.

I wish it was enjoyable for longer, because the soundtracks and graphics are all adorable.

This is my favorite Zachtronics game so far. It's beautiful to watch, and incredibly fun to solve the puzzles. The difficulty is definitely lower than games like Spacechem because you are not limited by space or number of waldos. However, I think that makes the game great because you have the freedom to solve puzzles less efficently and go back later.

Sigmar's Garden is also quite fun. I was a little confused at first but now it's a very relaxing game that requires a little less thought than the actual puzzles.

My only concern is the quantity of puzzles. The story felt a little short, probably because of the lower difficulty. Luckily, there's still high scores to beat and custom puzzles to solve. I'm hoping there are more achievements added, specifically "challenge" modes of levels, like how Spacechem/TIS had achieves for beating levels in a certain way.

Edit: The game has been updated with great new content! We have a new space-limited mode, which is actually amazing because it plays like SpaceChem- you need to be extremely wary of the space you take up.