Techtonica

My feelings about techtonica were fairly mixed. I originally bought the game mid early-access and decided to hold off on playing it until it was complete. Then I avoided playing it for some time after it 'released' as others were calling it abandonware. It's steam ratings also became quite.. mixed.. which was not encouraging. Finally I decided to play it in June 2025. My feelings about the game seemed to change in phases and I'll let my review take that format as well. Early Game: ________ I was immediately enamoured with the bioluminescent cave environment and focused on exploration. I had fun doing this and discovered some secret areas. The factory game mechanics seemed pretty standard and I didn't see anything that would deserve all the criticism it got on steam (YET). Overall I really enjoyed the early game, building production lines, and exploring the environment. I thought that there was a lot of attention to detail that went into certain things, and I loved how many easter eggs and dialogue snippets there were, for example how sparks pokes fun at you for exploring instead of doing the 'tutorial', multiple times based on what section of the first floor you are exploring. There was an air of mystery as I found corrupted audio logs that hinted at something weird going on story-wise. Mid Game: ________ Mid game is where the cracks started to appear. There would be large spikes in difficulty and the game got caught up in it's own plot to the detriment of it's gameplay. You are tasked with exploring one ruin after another, constantly crafting and fetching items to unlock doors, backtracking a lot and struggling with power generation. Early on you had to make a lot of fuel, then suddenly it's much less useful and you drop it in favour of very power hungry electric machines and drills. I still enjoyed many aspects but things slowly started to get tedious. Mid-Late Game: ________ Going into mid-late game is where the gameplay started to fall apart at the seams. Unlocking research tiers, then finding items, and making cores becomes a tedious process. Suddenly the production pipeline becomes a massive mess; If you were to put it on a node graph it would look like a hopelessly tangled pile of spaghetti with redundant or looping pathways. The game just dumps too much on you in a very tedious way while also trying to push the plot in a very linear and forced fashion. Characters become too serious and the lightheartedness is gone. Unlocking tech turns into too much of a scavenger hunt. You are forced to endlessly backtrack. All your factories suddenly become obsolete, needing to be rebuilt, but resources to do so are scarce. You also need to expand your factories, but build space is limited in these caves and the process of excavating cave walls is slow and tedious. You are managing several dozen item types both in terms of production and inventory management. The UI starts to get in the way as there are too many items and interacting with your hud becomes more cumbersome. In short, end game becomes a tedious mess and the sense of wonder is gone, I don't even want to explore anymore because it's just yet another boring pile of ruined blocks with hidden story items somewhere. There will soon be another spike in production difficulty curve, more factories needing overhaul, etc, etc, because.. Then you get to the desert levels.. The game tells you that you need to research and build many 'sand pumps' to remove all the sand from these floors.. Also your power network is cut off for some reason and you need to start a new one from scratch, go back to hand cranks?... No, Just No! Conclusion: ________ Mixed feelings. The game started off with a lot of promise and it really had something special going, but it looks like somewhere along the way it suffered from a severe case of scope creep and went downhill. You can really see the care and vision that was put into it at the beginning, but somewhere along the way the devs started blindly adding more and more content regardless of whether it was fun or not. Bugs, a lack of polish, and poor usability/QOL is the final nail in the coffin. The end result is that late game is all the worst parts of the factory game genre, all the overwhelming tedium and gradual loss of motivation without the sense of accomplishment. You did all this factory building? Great! None of it mattered! Now redo the whole thing again just because. It feels less like player agency and more like an ever expanding list of chores.. If you have not already made the mistake of buying into early access, I can't recommend getting the game in it's current (and probably final) state. If like me you already have it and haven't played though, well, there's some fun to be had in early game, but I recommend quitting once the cracks start to show in order to end on a positive note. I quite liked the soundtrack though.

Unfortunately this game is nothing but a perfect example of how Early Access is NOT done. They jumped from version 0.5 straight to a 1.0 release. And right after that they completely abandoned the game. Seriously? The game had so much potential, it's sad to see that they ended up releasing an unfinished, unpolished and unoptimized game and then discontinuing it right after going "full" release. They even changed the initial roadmap a few weeks before its release, after going 1.0 they completely vanished out of existance. I really can't recommend the game in this state, especially since its literally abandonware!

Do not buy! Abandonware. Studio closed up shop as soon as it left EA and hit 1.0 release. Been > 8 months since last update. Again, do not buy!

Techtonica is a game that had the perfect foundation to become one of the "greats" in the factory game genre, yet the developers completely fumbled the execution at the last possible second. Everything was going well, and then 0.5 happened, the update that added... laser tag... into a factory game? After that, there was a ton of backlash, the devs tried to explain why they chose to do what they did, people didn't listen. The developers continued to push on, though! In fact, they released a whole new roadmap and- Whoops! 1.0 is here! The "going up" update! Which was... supposed to be the 0.6 update? Not only that, but the game somehow developed backwards, and now all that's left is an empty husk. Now the devs are gone due to lack of funds to continue development, the game is totally abandoned, and... that's it, then. It's a shame, really. I was looking forward to what the real 1.0 would bring, and now we'll never get to see what could have been.

Today, I decided I had enough time to dive back into this game after it hit 1.0. Now, instead of playing the game, I am writing this review, because I am so incredibly disappointed how they changed the game since I last played it in early access. If I could get a refund I would do so as I do not ever plan on playing this ever again. This was a horrible way to start of the new year, and this has made it where I will never buy another game from your company. The choice to change from large sprawling map to little chunks that force you to literally wait for a progress bar for no reason significantly broke the game flow and made exploration forced and in the end, uneventful and boring. Giving someone a digging tool then capturing them into a undiggable boxes over and over is plain stupid. I can tell that the game had to be dumbed down to be able to be released on a console. The railroading and hand holding feels gross, and lack of a hardmode that has achievements is sad. It is hard to create atmosphere when I keep running until dead ends that I cannot pass. I dont feel lost trying to find my way, I feel like I am in prison. I feel no reason to care about anything I have built and now have to constantly go back and forth between floors. How can I create a huge sprawling map with cool railways if the map is so small. 0/10 The demo was a better game.

Played alot during EA. Loved everything about it. Tunneling.... Exploring.... Massive Areas to build. Version 1.0 changed everything. Now its level based. Exploring is very minimum now. I would only recommend this game on sale for $5 bucks at this point. It was worth the $20 bucks in EA but what they did to this beautiful game kind of kills it for me.

Abandoned, do not buy. They tried to release a beta version 0.6 as the 1.0 version and tell us its finished to get some sales, of course that did not work and now the company went bankrupt. Shame, it was a fun game....

Started off as an inferior Satisfactory that showed promise to become something pretty great. But then the updates went into a weird direction and got abandoned soon after without any warning. Don't be fooled by the "1.0 release", it's an incomplete, expensive mess. A better use of your money is to buy a screwdriver and jam it into your testicles, from experience I can tell you it will be a more pleasant, cheaper and memorable experience than trying to finish this game.