tl;dr: A story-driven first person shooter with incredible atmosphere and worldbuilding, suffering from lacklustre performance and bugs.

If you can stomach heavily fluctuating frames and occasional game freezes, Industria could be a perfect choice as a short, story-driven fps. Heavily inspired by Half-Life 2, it offers a great mix between phantastic storytelling and real-world events. What starts in East Berlin on the eve of the fall of the Berlin wall November 9th 1989 quickly leads to an alternate dimension when our main protagonist Nora follows her boyfriend Walter through a secret machine called ATLAS.

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The jump from late 80s East Germany into, what looks like, an alternative 1920s dieselpunk inspired city called Hakavik feels familiar and alien at the same time. Humanlike machines roam the streets, by design killing everything on sight. It's here where Industria really caught my attention. The city of Hakavik looks calm,, even serene, so long as no machine is trying to hunt you down. Scattered belongings of its former ─ human ─ inhabitants really invoke the impression of a place that had once been teeming with life. Every now and then, you'll find bits of written lore, allowing players to piece together the information themselves. The story is never fully explained and parts of it won't make sense even after you finished the game, leaving me with mixed feelings.

The atmosphere is a very strong aspect of Industria despite music being very rare, almost absent. Instead, ambient sounds and noises add to the feeling of loneliness and isolation. Although the city is rather small and many doors won't open, you're still switching between bright open streets and damp, dark buildings. The latter make full usage of your flashlight, which never fully runs out but becomes less and less useful if you do not find a battery on time. The weapon at the ready, there was an almost survival horror-like feeling whenever I was inside of a dark building. Pumping and pulsating noises from the machines were omnipresent, their footsteps giving away their position.

However, the intelligence of these constructs felt a bit lacking, almost comical at times. At first, everything is rushing at you but, if being damaged enough, many robots turned around and just ran in circles. This would make sense if they had actual means to repair themselves but the way it worked here it was almost as if somebody played the Benny Hill theme in the background. Combat didn't feel challenging and ammo was scarce until I noticed that some boxes could be crushed, providing plenty of options to take down robots without worrying about running out. What gave me a headache though were the forced autosaves and the very rare occasions to save at a typewriter, again giving off the feeling of old-school survival horror. These typewriters were almost always placed in a nonsensical way, like right before or after an auto-save.

Industria looks rather nice, especially for an indie game. This doesn't explain the abysmal performance, which became an issue after chapter 2, only getting worse the further I went. Sure, my RTX3060/i7-10870H/32GB RAM notebook is not exactly high-end but come on, running everything on medium settings with balanced DLSS and I'm still not getting frequent 50-60 fps feels rather poor. In the end, I even chose performance but this didn't seem to have much of an impact. Sometimes, I got short freezes or hiccups when shooting enemies, which naturally is the worst situation for said problems.

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Had I not known beforehand that Industria is a relatively short game, lasting around 2-4 hours, I would have abandoned it midway through the playthrough. Still, the story really resonated with me and I wanted to see its end. The latter felt abruptly, which could explain the recent announcement of Industria 2.

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Hakavik whenever I was not worried about my laptop catching fire or something. The second half of the game feels very unpolished, untested and, to a degree, unfinished, as if time and resources were running out for the project though. Therefore, I only recommend getting Industria on sale. It offers a unique setting and a story that kept me thinking, embedded in a mixture of walking sim and survival action. If you finish the game, still looking for answers, there is a great guide that summarizes everything up nicely while also trying to give answers to questions you're surely going to have.

After playing this game I wonder how low the budget of this game was, as it feels both unfinished and unpolished, almost like it was supposed to be a demo or an introduction chapter to a full game.

• First of all, it looks rather basic. Yes, the art design of locations is interesting, but technical implementation of said locations leaves much to be desired - most locations are pitch black, because the lights in windows are just yellow walls, not a source of light, so even in apartments with windows you will need a flashlight to see anything.
  
• Horrible gunplay. There are 4 guns and a melee tool in the game, only 2 of those guns are able to do their job reliably, the rest need half a mag to kill the most basic enemy, and you can only pick 2 spare mags - it almost feels like a stolen system from Resident Evil (like save points/typewriters), even though this game is a shooter and not a survival horror. The sound of those guns lacks any impact too, that only further subtracts from the experience.
  
• Horrible enemies. Even though only a few types of them are in the game, they all feel clunky, their movement is ragged as if they lack some frames in their animations. When you are using guns and the enemy just shifts a couple metres sideways without any animation - it is already bad, but when you are trying to use your melee and get hit before animation of the strike even starts or get hit while you are clearly outside of the strike radius - it just becomes frustrating, so you end up just running past enemies instead of fighting them. Oh, and if for whatever reason you were not frustrated enough - how about SMG bots that can hit you through walls? And this game has an achievement for no damage run, to make those bots not just frustrating but infuriating.
  
• Bugs. Lots of them. Do you like dying or getting damaged by nothing, in an empty corridor? Or maybe launching yourself into the air by grabbing a thing that you stepped on? Getting stuck on something that you can’t even see? At least my saves didn’t get corrupted like many other reviews mentioned, but loading sometimes took minutes even while working from SSD.
  
• With all the things I have said the fact that you can finish the game in 1,5 hours can be considered a good thing, but if you pay money for a game - I guess you want to actually play it, and there isn’t much gameplay to be had here. The story is basically non-existent, as it starts OK but ends without giving ANY answers (not like it could manage it in 1,5 hours).

Overall the game is simply too bad to be worth your time, let alone your money. If you want - you should rather watch other people suffering from it on youtube, just don’t subject yourself to this misery.

7.0 / 10