Techtonica

Its with a heavy heart I write this review. I first played in early access and really enjoyed the concept. I could free roam find cool things, get rewarded for finding a hidden area with a chest or a cool new building with story behind it. Build huge interconnected factories and make the world my own. Story was pretty interesting as well. It had a lot of the factory aspects other factory games have, but is missing some key features (like priority and blueprints), but its early access so I thought those will just come down the road. I finished the game and seeing the updates got me excited to come back in the future. Then the 1.0 release happened. Me without even thinking to look at what changed just dived right in excited to explore the open world again. Here is where the problems started and ultimately killed the game for me and I'm sure for many others. I full cleared everything to be as objective as possible as some items could be considered a matter of preference. I'll break it down by feature: ===== THE BAD ===== THE WORLD When I went out to explore to find that cool river area (now named the HYDRO floor) I was met by a indestructible wall very quickly. I thought maybe things just shifted around with the 1.0 release to make the map more cohesive. I quickly threw that notion out of the window once I hit a corner and realized its a very small box compared to the open world I knew. This completely killed a good portion of the game for me. The game was sold as an open world factory game not small prisons of factories you have to interconnect with just the elevator. I get from an optimization standpoint that this would help reduce load and some people get overwhelmed with too much they could potentially do. This feels like a dramatic shift in who they were catering to, but that in itself isn't a bad thing. What a lot of people are mad about is this wasn't explained as their end goal and was sold as open world up until the sudden 1.0 change ripping what they had enjoyed about it. The world itself isn't bad, but the dramatic shift away from what the game's spirit and was sold as is. EXPLORATION This was effectively killed with the 1.0 release. Gone are the days of exploring to find some cool structure, story element, hidden chest or upgrade. Now you are stuck within a cube, the majority of things you can find all found relatively quick. You can no longer get lost in the world as you explore. Each floor contains a small amount on its own which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the massive time sink problem (explained later) between them. Before 1.0 I remember finding a chest and being excited about it. Now many are filled with just fuel or coolant and that's it. The amount of chests with useful items feels extremely few and far between which ruined the excitement behind them. It became oh great another chest I bet its just fuel..yup so glad I explored. There is good stuff out there, but with the time sink problem this just makes the exploration process frustrating the majority of the time. PERFORMANCE = BE ADVISED Now for the elephant in the room. To start we played multiplayer. Single player may be fine on its own, but the game was made around multiplayer (an example the laser tag update). This wasn't that bad for a good portion of the game. The game was well playable with no issues until the later half of the game. Once you Hit Sierra however that's when the game will get horrid. The host is fine with minimal frame loss, but sand is HORRIBLY unoptimized, feels like it was never tested for multiplayer, and just slapped on so they could push a 1.0 update. Once we hit that floor you just desync if you are a non host player entering. Occurs immediately. You can expect to see disappearing items, sand seemingly dumped into the void when entering a chest only visible on rejoining, belts containing items the host removed multiple minutes ago. Frame rates tank for the non host player. We are talking full second freezes every few seconds, items taking multiple seconds to remove from chests, Buildings taking multiple seconds to place or erase, etc. We shifted the save between multiple people to rule out any local issues and experienced the same result. Host has minimal problems while everyone else is barely playable and just a frustrating experience over all. If any other factory game was this bad it would be slammed on the ratings (looking at the recent reviews mirrors this sentiment). There was this update they posted about how the game is being optimized. It really feels like that was only done for the first 11 floors. After that they just pushed whatever else out for the 1.0 release without a care. THE FACTORY There are a lot of good things about the factory. This only covers a few issues this aspect is missing or problems it runs into. The lack of blueprints and priority on belts and inserters is an issue. This prevents a lot of the fun of making complex factories and balancing. This wastes time, but overall isn't really that bad a thing just an inconvenience. The only issue we ran into was one where rarely inserters will just delete and item they held. Was not able to reproduce, but this only occurred after we hit the bad sand performance levels. TIME SINKIA The game play loop turned from making big factories feeding the production terminals to drill bits go brrr. The upgrades now are minuscule compared to before. Only a few buildings or materials. This leads to burning through everything you can do on that floor very quickly and getting locked behind spending drill bits to reach a floor, get a upgrade you didn't need and continue onward. Multiple doors have items you cant even get from the floor you find them, back tracking and just waiting for production to do anything. The game went from feeding productions terminals and scaling that to how fast you want them to a waiting for the elevator simulator. This is more of a problem early on, but a lot of the game play loop went from upgrading terminals and science to sitting around waiting for some specific thing you couldn't do anything about a few floors back and now need an exorbitant amount of an item you couldn't prepare for prior. This does get better as time goes on, but by then you hit the terrible sand lag so instead of wasting time due to deliberate time sink mechanics now its due to performance. The original loop just felt good and made sense. A production terminal needs things to produce things and all the inserter points had a reason to exist. RIP MONORAIL I cant in good faith say this item should be in the game. Levels are so small now that there is no reason to use this over a belt. With the elevator having limited ports (granted a lot) to reach other floor there is just no use over being fed directly. Sure it could be used for transportation for a time, but this gets replaced later on by something better. === THE GOOD === STORY I wont spoil anything, but I will say this is one shining example of what the game could have been. Its engaging even with the time sink problem and interesting enough to keep you invested. THE FACTORY While not as complex and missing features (such as blueprints and priority) compared to other factory games the loop was interesting and I liked how it all works together. As you progress you can redesign your factory to suit an entire new building process as opposed to the usual just scaling up you see a lot. There was a lot of potential here, but I don't know if this will ever get another update. If you are looking to just try another factory game don't pay full price. On sale its probably worth it, but if you are looking to find that next Factorio or Satisfactory you go back to now and again to get super invested this isn't it. I'm truly sad about this. I really had high hopes and enjoyed the game so much in early access. I really like the concept of the higher levels, but there are just so horribly optimized it has to be done single player to enjoy