Techtonica

Alright game, gameplay loop is decent. 1.0 update was pushed out for the sake of calling it done, there's a few obvious bugs that aren't being fixed and are unlikely to be fixed.

Unfinished Game... Playing feels like pure waste of time Don't buy it, even if it's on sale, because you'll just be wasting your time.

abandoned, dont buy

Well... what can I say - 2/10. Another example of developers not playing their own game. The UI is a nightmare. Switching between items, selecting recipes, copying - all of it is terrible. This whole system needs a complete redesign. Scrolling big drill terminal numbers from 1 to 16 without being able to scroll back... insanely "convenient", yeah. The first part of the game takes around 8-12 hours. The second one (From sierra) takes 60+. The pump system is absolutely insane. There is no proper fuel production at all. There is NO electricity in the second section! Or if it exists, it is unbelievably inconvenient. Why didn't you make a better way to place batteries when the entire second half of the game is based on them? (You just can add placement as you made with concrete floor for example...) Crushers also don't generate enough power - I had 50 of them based on sesamite sand refining, and it still wasn't enough. In the end, I was cranking the handle of electric generators manually for the whole 60 hours... Explosive drills sound cool, but the implementation is awful. Resources just disappear into nowhere. I'm not even sure if the ore disappear when they doing an explode with full inventory. Why wasn't there a limiter so they stop when they're full? Also, where is compressed explosives or tier 2 explosives? It's super inconvenient to craft 600 explosives and then try to distribute them with manipulators that only move 12 at a time. By the way, where is the manipulator upgrade? Why can't we place stacks of items on conveyors? And why do these rails even exist if they're so useless and mostly just get in the way when I flying? Yes, they have x3 speed for manipulator placements, but they are big and because of that you can't place it at places inside of factory Player drill upgrades sucks... not sure that it drilling faster after them... :\ Splitters work terribly and incorrectly. With two inputs and two outputs, they WAIT for one input and only then let the other one through, because of that they don't work simultaneously, which slows everything down. Too many useless decorative blocks. We only need floor, bigger floor, single floor - and why can't I place the single floor collumn upward by holding the button? Why it works only for horizontal placement? Oh, and by the way, there are tons of modules and upgrades like flight and stuff. I didn't find them at all :) In the first 8-12 hours I actually wanted to explore. In the second segment, I had zero desire to do so. My progression got stuck at Sierra T2 when I got to lvl 16... Afterwards I remembered that I have omni detector (never used it before, I suppose that this detector only needs to find all sneaky places where level designer decided to hide important upgrades) Movement is painfully slow. And even if you get all the flight upgrades... vertical speed doesn't increase. Why? What's the point then? The whole second half of the game is about flying up and down! Copying of recipies only works for the first few hours. Later it bugs out and you just can't copy buildings anymore. Also, where is mass copy? Some crafts like electrical engines and actuators are only needed once for all possible production chains. You build them and never need more. So why do they even exist? Yes, they probably need for science... but... you know... 60 hours of sand sucking... one factory of el-engine created A LOT of them... I couldn't find any way to increase seeds amount. Guess you just have to harvest them manually to get more crops... Building snapping often works poorly. Placing a single block upward at the edge of a 5x5 platform is often impossible. Clipping through platforms when flying up is extremely annoying. You can't fall back down through them, so you have to fly around. Flying controls are also awful. If you take off and there's something above you, your jetpack gets disabled. And why is takeoff on holding a button instead of a toggle?.. Oh, and the Paladin location... It's so badly designed, so counterintuitive, and so stupidly hidden that I completed EVERYTHING what I can and just stucked because can't find him, and was go to google where it is to continue. Did the level designer even test this with real people?.. Making a hole... there?.. Seriously? I tested on several friends - no one noticed the hole And back to the pumps: why do they keep consuming fuel when they can't extract sand anymore? Thanks at least for the red containers - enough space to store all that damn glass from sand...

DO NOT BUY. THIS GAME IS ABANDONED. Go to the Techtonica website, check the road-map. Down the bottom you will see "Previous Updates", that list only goes up to 0.5 because that's as far as the game ever got. The developers got to 0.5 and decided finishing the game is too hard so they chopped the open world up into little areas that you access via an elevator so that they can say they "fixed" the performance issues the game was plagued with and then that's it. There is no end, the game is still obviously in an unfinished state and the devs are gone.

The reviews saying it's "unfinished" are maybe a little harsh. I would instead say it's a game that's a little unpolished and whose vision isn't fully realized. I never played before 1.0 so i can't comment on the drastic changes made to the map. I would recommend this game, especially on sale, to fans of the factory genre looking for a new experience or new optimization puzzles that are a little different from what's offered by Factorio or Satisfactory (the gold standards of the genre). Techtonica definitely has something fun to offer despite it's issues, those being some minor bugs and a some potential small frustrations with a lack of QoL features. The sand levels due have the potential to frustrate if you're not prepared. Using the Techtonica Calculator website and it's maps is recommended. Total actual playtime to 100% is about 60 hrs on easy, which is the experience I would recommend.

I actually like this game! I'm not sure why so many people are against it. It's a nice factory game with a compelling story. It would need some refinement here and there, but the game is there. So sad the developers gave up. After finishing the game, I am more aligned with most of review: the ending levels are just annoying as hell. you reach a point in which I just had to let my pc there (fans screaming in pain) to just get the production going for hours and hours. it suffers from what is the most common problem of the genre. the scaling up of everything you've done multiple times or... wait. It could be a great game with just some fine tuning.

Amazing game. Came for the factory, stayed for the story. Recommended.