Techtonica

If I could refund it… I absolutely would, without hesitation. The devs claim the game is “finished” and maybe by EA standards, it technically is. The whole experience is odd at best. It feels slow and strangely padded out, as if you’ve done a lot while somehow accomplishing absolutely nothing. The pacing is completely off. It genuinely seems like the devs made the first two hours engaging on purpose, only for the progression to hit a brick wall immediately after. You’ll spend 20 minutes mining your way to a “secret,” only to find… nothing. Or maybe a chest. Or a few machines you can’t even use yet because you’re not far enough in the game. Not exactly thrilling exploration. Then there’s the elevator a boring gateway to another “level,” offering little more than a loading screen with ambition. As I mentioned before, the game feels padded out purely to waste your time cumbersome, crude, and overall unpolished. Research is equally non-engaging. You need to craft cores, place them down, and the number of cores determines your research points. It takes up a ridiculous amount of space, can’t be meaningfully automated, and ends up being a massive disappointment in a game supposedly about automation and “exploration.” Speaking of exploration… it’s underwhelming to the point of comedy. You spend hours wandering around cave systems only to find nothing or, if you’re lucky, a random structure that contains basically nothing. All around? A solid 3/10. Save yourself the frustration and go play Satisfactory or Factorio. Both have active dev teams, real support, and actual gameplay depth.

Don't waste your money. This game was more or less abandoned and there are much better options available.

In short: This game rocks. In detail: I rarely write reviews. I've played Techtonica for over a year now, well before the most recent, final version was released. Everything from the game play itself to the atmospheric immersion is wonderful. The details are incredible. That lil plant you see growing on the wall? Scan it; there's an entire research entry for it! So, why now? Why write the review? I gifted the game to my friend recently and couldn't help but notice all of the negative reviews. I was shocked and honestly a little frustrated. WHAT the heck was going on? Game rocks, where are the poor reviews coming from? They'd been incredibly positive last time I looked. After reading them I decided to make this review to just outline a couple of things. The devs have been very clear in discord, but since not everyone is in there I will go ahead and paste a quote from them. @devs, I hope this isn't wrong to do; your transparency should be seen across all platforms and honestly my heart hurts reading some of these reviews. Your hard work does not go unnoticed, thank you. "We love Techtonica and would love to keep working on it but we need to eat and pay rent, and right now sales aren't enough for us to keep working on it. Of course if sales improve then things could change but right now we're not doing more development, 1.0 was our final push." The game is complete. If you're reading this, wondering what all is going on and questioning whether or not you should buy it: yes. 100% yes. The game is great. Would I like to see more development? Also yes. Are there bugs in the game? Yes. Do I wish I could rename each Nexus? Yes. Is that a minor detail? To me, yes. The story is fantastic, the execution is stunning, the mechanics are so much fun. Lastly, I just want to say that I'm not trying to undermine anyone's review. It is so important that we can freely discuss games here, and its not about that. I'm just trying to provide some context and wanted to share how much I love the game. Seriously, it is incredible.

Did the developer abandon it? Probably. Did it fail to live up to its potential? Definitely. Are better games out there? Always. Despite that, Techtonica is still a unique take on the factory genre. I like its approach to storytelling more than its competitors, and the bioluminescent caves are beautiful. I'm glad I gave Techtonica a chance.

So fun at the start, feels like a game rich with story and good mechanics - but then as you build up the hours the game grinds to a halt (I experienced 120fps down to 20fps) and you realise that it's essentially abandonware and the story/game goes absolutely nowhere. Poor show.

First and foremost this is a rushed ending abandonware. The concept is ok, having a story to go along with your factory game can be fun as it gives a direction for the possibly endless amounts of stuff you make. Balancing on this game is horrendous, partly again due to devs rushing to finish the game before they shut down. Almost every alternative recipe is objectively worse than the base unless you refactor the entire base to use the new item set. Pacing is rough, up to point Sierra can take you a day or two simply ferrying items between assemblers without needing too much infrastructure outside of some basic component smelting. After Sierra the devs added a tremendous wall on one of the levels and then cut the difficulty back to like 20% after that. That singular level will take more time than the rest of the game to get past. The choice to switch from a singular open level into 16 tiered levels during EA just to give a better meaning to the elevator wasn't great. It limited the exploration aspect and the story progression/level layout doesn't make sense after that. We dig up for the elevator from easier to harder levels and all the top floors require you to dig down?? Optimization is terrible, after building only a few hundred objects (floor, machine, belts..) the game starts to hitch like crazy. I have a Ryzen 5900x, 32Gb ram, and a 3080 I shouldn't be struggling this hard this quickly. Multiplayer has it's issues, typical problems I've found so many games to have including: unlocks re-highlight every login, connection to host issues, achievements not unlocking and the like. If it wasn't for the fact that I like hunting achievements I'd have stopped playing long ago as my last ~30hrs have been jumping from 1 and 30fps waiting for an ungodly amount of time wasting crafts to finish for the playtime buffer level...

Sadly this game was abandoned and the studio closed at the time of release, leaving it with massive game-breaking multiplayer bugs. It's a real shame as the game mechanics and concepts are good, definitely a solid foundation. Multiplayer is unplayable once you get past a few levels due to extreme lag/stuttering (up to several second pauses at a time) every time any player interacts with any machine in the game.

It was such a promising game. The devs abandoned it to slap the 1.0 label on it though, while changing the entire game. Avoid this abandonware.