Techtonica

Single player : this game is great. Multiplayer, : after about elevator level 10 the lag makes the game unplayable. If you're playing alone and like factory games then this is definitely worth playing. If you want a factory game to play with your friends then stay away - the lag ruins the game later on. Such a shame as, in my opinion, the whole game is great and I like all the differences (multi level elevator, upgrade how you make things etc). I REALLY wish the developer would address the multiplayer lag and at least release a small patch. This is a gem of a game ruined by lag :-(

Hoo, boy. This game. I have many thoughts. Let me preface this by saying I am a big fan of similar games like Satisfactory, which is one of my favourite games of all time. Even without comparing Techtonica to it's competition, it has a lot of issues. Techtonica is an ambitious attempt at crafting an experience similar to something like Satisfactory where you are tasked with mining resources and building huge factories that process materials, but with more of an emphasis on story and level-based design. The game takes place entirely underground, and your goal is to dig your way out. The game contains some fantastic scenery including luminescent plants, waterfalls, and the ruined research labs of those that came before you. The music is fantastic - ambient and calming - and there there are several voiced characters to deliver the narrative exposition. There is a lot to like here, don't get me wrong. However, it falls VERY short of delivering a satisfying experience. The game is riddled with bugs, to start. There were multiple times when I had placed chests or conveyor belts, only to be unable to delete them afterwards. Similar small bugs kept occurring throughout my playthrough, and I'd need to restart the game every time something like this occurred to fix it. You are also sometimes just given blatantly incorrect information that was never corrected, including the locations of key items that you will need to progress. This can lead to a lot of aimless searching through levels trying to find certain scannable items, only to later find out that they were never in that level to begin with. If this only happened once or twice, I could forgive it, but I had to pull up google several times to learn that the game was giving me wrong information, and without looking things up I genuinely would not have been able to progress. To sum up a few more points, the game has baffling gameplay/design choices (such as when you are given access to certain technologies), a narrative that ended up feeling too convoluted to be satisfied with (at least in my opinion), and horrible CPU-related performance issues. I am not exaggerating when I say that a good chunk of my 140-hour playthrough was like watching a slideshow, with framerates dropping to 10-20fps. I could not get the game to perform any better by turning down any graphical settings (though with a 5070Ti for a GPU, you'd think I wouldn't have to). There were several times throughout the game where I was genuinely close to giving up on it entirely, but I pushed through because I felt like I had to at least see how the game ended after the progress I had made. Ultimately, I can't say it was worth doing so. Sadly, the game has been abandoned and it is unlikely any of these key issues will ever be fixed. Even after finishing the game and all of it's objectives, I cannot recommend Techtonica even to other fans of factory-building or automation-focused games unless you are reaaaaaally desperate for this type of experience and are willing to overlook a lot of problems.