A promising transport game that still feels unfinished
InfraSpace has a genuinely strong foundation. The graphics are excellent, the buildings feel alive, and small details such as moving machinery on rooftops make the city enjoyable to watch. Buildings become taller as they grow more efficient, which gives the city a visible sense of development.
The basic concept is good, the production overview is useful, and the mechanics are easy to understand. New players can get into the game quickly, while experienced players in the genre will barely need a tutorial. I also appreciate that the developers still release occasional bug fixes and substantial performance improvements, despite considering the game finished since 2023.
Unfortunately, that finished status is also the reason for my negative review.
In my opinion, InfraSpace is not finished. It still feels like an Early Access game, especially in the areas that are supposed to form its core: traffic management and logistics.
The game provides roads, one-way roads, trains, gondolas, pipes, warehouses and distribution centres. The problem is not that transport methods are missing. The problem is that the player has almost no meaningful control over them.
You build the infrastructure, but you cannot properly determine what should be transported, where it should go or which route it should take. The system is simply there, and then something happens in the background. That is not enough for a game that advertises detailed control over roads, railways and transport networks.
The lane-management system allows some detailed road configuration, including deciding how individual lanes connect. Unfortunately, this is one of the only genuinely detailed traffic-management tools available.
There is not even a proper overview showing where traffic congestion is occurring. When a building operates at 40% efficiency because of traffic, you often have to inspect roads manually until you find the problem. A traffic heatmap, coloured minimap or congestion overlay should be a basic feature in a game built around traffic management.
There are also very few ways to control logistics:
* You cannot properly decide which buildings may deliver to which destinations.
* You cannot create global distribution rules, such as sending a percentage of steel to one industrial area, another percentage to a second area and the remainder to a depot.
* You cannot prioritise certain materials for rail transport.
* You cannot define fixed truck routes for specific buildings or vehicle types.
* You cannot reliably ensure that critical materials such as steel or concrete are delivered to a specific facility.
* Individual buildings cannot be throttled without reducing the output of an entire production category.
* Distribution centres provide very little practical benefit and do not offer larger trucks, higher transport capacity or the ability to combine multiple goods into one shipment.
* Warehouses and depots do not provide enough control over which resources they receive or where those resources are sent.
The logistics logic itself can produce completely irrational results.
I had two industrial locations on opposite sides of the map. Both locations produced and consumed steel locally. Instead of supplying nearby buildings, location A sent steel across the entire map to location B, while location B sent its steel back to location A.
This completely destroys any attempt at efficient planning.
The same problem occurs with warehouses. A warehouse located directly next to concrete and steel production may be ignored while trucks drive across the entire map to a different warehouse. Local production and consumption should be the most efficient solution, but the game frequently works against it.
In practice, the only reliable approach is to centralise the production of a resource and distribute everything from that location. The game has a very clear style of network that it expects the player to build. Deviating from that style often causes inefficient and uncontrollable transport behaviour.
That is disappointing because decentralised production should be one of the most interesting parts of a logistics game.
Road and rail management also creates unnecessary manual work. Replacing roads deletes their existing traffic rules, forcing the player to configure them again. There is no convenient option to replace all roads or tracks of one type with another, and no efficient area tool for deleting only a specific road or rail type.
The game also lacks several important management tools:
* Better train management
* Blueprints for groups of buildings
* Multi-selection and copy-and-paste
* Clear information about inactive or inefficient buildings
* A proper overview of missing resources and stored materials
* A visual overview of separate electricity networks and overloaded grids
* Better resource and warehouse management
* The ability to define which materials should use roads, railways or other transport systems
* Proper routing and destination rules for trucks
* Roundabout blueprints in different sizes
Traffic management is presented as one of the game’s major selling points, yet the tools required to manage traffic are extremely limited.
Gondolas are also disproportionately powerful compared with trains. They accelerate immediately, maintain a constant flow and require no meaningful loading or unloading delays. Trains, by comparison, take time to accelerate and spend significantly longer loading and unloading. Gondolas require large buildings, but from a transport perspective they function almost like a permanent flow of goods and can trivialise a large part of the logistics system.
Pipes create a similar problem. Once pipes are researched, liquids largely disappear from road transport. In my city, this reduced traffic by roughly three quarters. However, after switching to pipes, there is also very little control over whether liquids should still be transported by road in specific situations.
The city-building side is extremely shallow as well. Residential buildings mainly exist to provide workers and create demand for resources. Beyond that, the city itself has very little relevance. The city-building element feels more like a support system for the production chains than a meaningful part of the game.
Progression is not satisfying. The late game mostly consists of waiting for research to finish or waiting for goods to travel from one location to another. Once the basic solution is understood, the gameplay becomes repetitive: build production buildings, surround them with a one-way road loop, connect that loop to a larger road and wait.
The long playtime does not come from deep decision-making. Much of it comes from research timers and transport delays.
InfraSpace could have been a major hit. The visual presentation is excellent, the core idea is strong and the developers have shown that they are capable of delivering technical improvements. But the systems required to support the central premise of the game are still missing or severely underdeveloped.
The game offers many types of infrastructure, but almost none of the tools required to control them properly.
For $5–10 during a sale, it may be worth trying as a relaxing sandbox. At full price, I cannot recommend it.
The developers classify InfraSpace as a finished game. In my opinion, it is not finished. It offers far too little depth, particularly in traffic management and logistics, while the city-building component exists mainly to consume resources.
It has the foundation of a good game, but in its current state it feels like a good Early Access demo rather than a complete transport and management simulation.
