Techtonica

I have supported this game with over 400 hours of play time. If I played it so much, you may wonder, why give it a thumbs down? Simple: You have a significant change in the game that was NEVER tested in early access. The change not only altered the play of the game but made several things impossible. Then, add to that the fact that they announced the game is dead right after shoving a drastically changed 1.0 out the door??? Very unprofessional. So in the EA release that we tested, everything was an expansive world and you had to locate the different locations. One of those levels had an elevator that you had to figure out how to repower it to make it usable. Since they were all on one level you could, for example, go to the location called "The Battery", you could rebuild the storage and increase the power and then run wires to other locations. NOW with 1.0 everything is in this vertical orientation and not only that but no way to route power to different levels. You can move products from one level to another but for crying out loud you have to create a power station on EVERY. SINGLE. LEVEL. TO. DO. ANYTHING. If they actually cared about the finished product then they would have sat back and MAYBE??? include a power channel up and down the elevator so you can easily spread power from one location to every level. But they just wanted to toss it out the door and say goodbye. Tonight I found how they threw this out without any care: The assembler has recipes and it defines what products it needs and how much you get out of it. Copper Wire has a recipe for 12 wires however the assembler only gives 10 wires. So they won't ever fix this bug because they have shut down development on the game. And that dropping of the game is why this is the last game I will pay for with this company.

The game was a lot of fun in early access, and the game is a lot of fun now - UNTIL you reach a certain level of factory development, at which point the game becomes completely unplayable. My computer is running a 3080 with 12 gigs of vram and a i7 12700k. On minimum setting I am getting a consistent 7 fps and I get stutters where I'm waiting several seconds per frame. For a game to decline this poorly into 1.0 is completely unacceptable. The devs seriously need to address the performance issues.

Overall it's a good game that shows alot of promise. However the developers decided to abandon it with the 1.0 release. Even with 1.0 it still has bugs and balance issues. Whiile I would recommend as it's well done for a underground factory building game. The developers denial that it still needs work even after the 1.0 release prevents me from doing so. So if you want a try something different and more unique for a factory builder game, feel free to try it. However when you get up to the levels where you are dealing with sand, expect blanace issues and other problems the developers refuse to fix. Mod makers helped solve these issues however. So if one does get it, I would recommend going the modded playthrough route.

I really liked this game, but it's super crappy that they pushed out the release and then apparently closed up shop, without any public notice. I was tolerating the poor optimization of the game because I believed it would be fixed in a future release. Now that I know that no updates are coming, ever, I just don't want to play it anymore :(

Played it for a while in early 2024 (pre-1.0); it seemed to have real promise, and I looked forward to coming back to it. It had nice visuals and seemed to have a decent storyline. The main thing I liked that kept me wanting to return was the sense of real value in exploration; you could dig a big, long tunnel to try to locate a far-off signal you'd uncovered. It really felt like you were trapped under the surface of a strange and beautiful world, trying to get out. It made me want to advance up the tech tree to unlock rail systems or high-voltage power to feed my factory across an expansive underground world. Fast forward to 2026: I load up again, thinking 1.0 has been out for a while, and I bet there is so much crazy-cool stuff to explore. I load up a new game and quickly encounter the “new” freight elevator, which, after completing the tutorial section, quickly dumps you out onto the second “region”…one of the first things you encounter is the “edge of the map” wall. Nothing has destroyed my will to play and explore more than that painfully obvious boundary wall. A little bit of exploration later, and I discovered what used to be an expansive feeling world is now chopped up into constrained feeling chunks, with the freight elevator serving as a loading screen to go between them. Don’t get me wrong, I'm not mad at the resource sink of feeding materials into some black box; it can be an excellent way to get players to build bigger to unlock the next level of tech (i.e. Satisfactory). Hell, even this game had it with feeding the terminals; I am disappointed by the decision to chop up what was a beautiful world into 2000s-era levels separated by a loading-screen elevator. It honestly felt like, in 2024, I somehow played a more advanced version of the game than the “full-release” version. In terms of bugs and glitches, I did encounter a few minor ones, including buildings not accepting resources from my inventory, which was fixed by just closing and re-opening the building menu. Not game-breaking, but not a great sign either. People are saying the devs have abandoned the game, and given there's been no activity in a few years, I would say that checks out. Honestly, the game feels like one of the old factories you come across on the maps, something promising, abandoned, half-built to decay into obscurity. Do yourself a favour and skip this one. If you want a good first-person factory building experience, play Satisfactory instead. I know I will be. TLDR – It had promise once upon a time, but it is worse now than pre-1.0. Skip this one; there are too many good factory games out there now to bother with this one.

Starting off, I want to say, I love the game, and I want to be able to recommend it. But I just can't for various reasons. So, for longer feedback... To start with the most important portion. The game used to be rock-solid for me during the pre-release days. I wasn't able to crash the game, even with trying silly things. At release I had major crashing problems (which turned out to be motherboard BIOS issues for the most part, so if you have similar problems... they upgraded the backend engine during the upgrade, and the new engine is VERY temperamental when it comes to hardware being "just so", so check for updates to BIOS, drivers, etc. And worse case make sure everything is seated and has appropriate cooling! It should solve 95% of the crashing issues)... but I still can have it crash on my unexpectedly.... Which brings me to the first reason I can't recommend it. The developer released the game with a "okay, we're done, no more updates, bbyyyyyyyyeeeeee" type post (it's in the dev log on steam, so go read them). Because of this, I don't expect to see any bug fixes or other fixes the game will invariably need. So, I can't recommend it. It WILL have bugs that they won't fix. Don't spend the money unless you are willing to accept that. In terms of the game itself, during development this game had a lot of promise. It went some fun (and weird) directions at times, and it's story was looking really engaging. However, the jump from the previous version to the release was long, but seemed extremely rushed now that we know went into it. I don't know why that might have been (internal pressures, external pressures... who can say other than the devs?) but I do know we went from a single large map that pretty much REQUIRED you to figure out long-distance logistics and therefore use those mechanics, to multiple smaller maps that you don't need to think too much to get things from a to b. They also removed entirely the ability for alternate maps, so you get one map, that's it. Done. No other options. There are portions of the story that feel tacked-on, and plot threads that seem to be dropped. And the latter plot is VERY rushed compared to how the intro plot is pieced together, and I really dislike the way the ending works mechanically, because it feels like we slip into "cutscene mode" for the ending, and there was multiple ways they could have incorporated the ending into the game itself seemlessly... And, again, due to the developer saying "we're done, no more update", these issues will never be resolved. So, I can't recommend the game to anyone who likes following plot threads or trying to learn more about a world through gameplay, or to anyone who likes to have their character be DOING the thing, instead of watching the thing. In terms of a factory-builder game... the early to late gameplay progression is streamlined, and works well. The late gameplay progression... is... I don't even know why most of it is there, to be honest. They introduce a new mechanic for end-game progression right at the end game, and it just feels like make-work. During the early-mid game some of the progression seems weirdly "gated", but there is lore behind why you can't easily access something in the tech tree. And speaking of the tech tree, especially the end-game tech tree, if you're playing for the story (and that's the only "mode" now in game, to be honest), you can skip pretty much all of the end-game tree but one thing. And that one thing is so easy to automate it seems almost like "oh yeah, oops, we're a factory-builder game, we should include that somehow in the ending" and not a pre-planned decision). I CAN recommend this game for the early to early-late gameplay. The factory design and automation stuff there will keep you amused for days, if not weeks (or more), if you like dealing with those sort of mechanics. And, to address one of the biggest "gripes" I have heard about, the laser-tag thing. That looked like it would have been lots of fun with the right people( but I'm not a HARDCORE MULTIPLAYER PWNING N00BS type person). I thought it was integrated well into the lore of the game, while also enabling some fun extendable options to gameplay for later. Even though I loathe multiplayer in almost all cases, this seemed like an amusing and potentially interesting thing to include in the game. Honestly, I was looking forward to building out a stupid base, and messing around for a few hours in it with different friends... like real laser tag. It's just a spot of fun. I DO NOT consider this a reason to not recommend, nor do I see it as a reason to recommend. So, long-story... Of the main categories of things about a game I like, all of them died immediately when the dev dropped the release and said "no further updates". That killed all potential for this game to be great. Even if they'd said "so, we're going to release a few minor patches to shore up bugs and stuff, on the side, over the next few months", I'd recommend this game with my full voice... but I can't. If you get it for free? It's a great game, but I don't recommend anyone spend money on it and reward the devs for dropping and running.

I'll be honest. This game seemed like it was destined to be an instant classic.... that is until the aftermath of the last early access update which was 0.5. Not long after that, the devs tried to convince us all that jumping from .5 to 1.0 was somehow normal for a game release, especially when the final 1.0 update almost completely retconned everything that was great about the game that it once was. If I could hit the thumbs down button thousands of times, rest assured that I would