Techtonica

You know what? I didn't play the game during its apparently absolutely MIND-MELTING MYTHICAL pre-1.0 phase. I'm playing the post-BEST CLIMAXES OF YOUR LIFE EVERY MINUTE YOU LOOK AT THE SCREEN version. I'm playing the 1.0 version. And it's GREAT. IT'S A GOOD GAME. All these people ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and crapping all over the game, I don't understand. Maybe it was better before, but please hear me: you NEED to shut up. This game is great. The company won't hear your complaints and do better -- people will just NOT GET TO PLAY this GREAT GAME. I've been playing consistently for ~70 hours as of now. I thought I noticed one bug, but it was simply a UI behavior I didn't understand. There is a late-ish game performance critical bug, read the edit at the end. The plot has continued to be neat, I'm nearing late game now (floor ~15, I want to reveal as little as possible) but the tech tree has been really cool, the quality-of-life touches this game does with things like building belts are great. I wish it had drag-building of buildings, and/or Blueprints/copy-and-paste of blocks of machines (mods DO add that! Read the edit) but I've been playing pure stock right up to here and I keep coming back. Honestly there are SO. MANY. neat little "why can't all games do that!?" features that I keep poking my room-mates about -- hey check it out, you can switch belt variants with V and turn with R and go back with Q and plan out an ENTIRE BELT without issues! If you're in the middle of building a long belt with lots of height changes and corners and need to erase something, you can just switch to Erase mode with F and switch back after deleting stuff and it'll JUST REMEMBER the hologram path for the belt you've been building! Check out this little UI overlay in the corner, it's SO HANDY. On and on, so many things to love. Understand two things; This appears to be the final version, and people are upset about that and some of the most recent changes in the last update. I expect my review and opinion of the game to change more over time than this game will. (Edit, it already has, twice, mostly for the better.) I'm not an Early Access player from this game; I'm ranking this game as a snapshot, at 1.0 -- FINAL. The way games were in The Before Times(tm) when you bought a game and that was it. I'm looking at this as a pressed disc game, on a platform which can't update. I'm ranking this game as a Finished Product(tm), not on some collective feeling over time, with weight on the past or future actions of the developers. I'm not ranking the developers, the publisher, or their current (in)solvency. I'm not ranking it on politics, or how their dog looks on social media. Right now. This game has lots of content. It plays well, it feels rewarding, and I very much intend to finish it. Digging and exploration is interesting, the voice acting is actually pretty great. I haven't gotten very far with the plot but I'm loving it. There are SO MANY little QoL perks I keep wanting in other games now. The world looks vibrant and interesting, unlike most factory games. The tech tree isn't "the usual" from bottom to top, it's interesting and does stuff I've never seen. Others have complained that the alternate recipes aren't valuable and that BLOWS MY MIND. I was having issues keeping up with SEVERAL production requirement increases, until I noticed that I could use this one new thing to make WAY MORE of the other thing, and faster -- and that kept happening. These people don't understand the value of these recipes because they're used to having Factory Calculator mods and UIs which expose per-unit and per-time production factors more clearly; they are NOT used to "doing it themselves" and they're very loud about that. Genuinely; IGNORE all the "it stopped solving world hunger post-1.0" people who can't get over changes to their favorite thing. PLEASE. If you enjoy factory games where you have to actually figure things out, give this game a chance! Especially if it's on sale. Sadly I have no idea where the money spent actually goes, but you'll still be trading the same currency for the same experience, and it really is pretty good. EDIT: Important mods, since patches won't ever be released to fix some issues: Late-ish game, during the sand stages, the Crusher machines you start using cause a performance problem due to computationally complex lookups done every tick. I was down to ~10fps, on empty floors. YIKES. There's a mod which caches that lookup, and a few others I suggest. With the mods, ~45fps on an empty floor. It's UNBELIEVABLE. STRONG recommend, find them on the Thunderstore -- Nexus is barren. Look for CrusherPerformanceBoost and CrusherPerformanceFix, they approach it from different and equally important angles. There are also mods to enable "virtual" processing cores, AKA cores which you can't see, aka cores which don't hurt your framerate, but they're broken currently. I tried both VirtualCores and BetterCoreManagement. RecipeBook is also VERY NICE. FlightFixes is another which fixes a bug where you "stumble" on ledges as you climb with the hoverpack (once unlocked) which has been the most frustrating gameplay bug I've run into. Blueprints is just what it says on the tin. I haven't felt need to do much more than that. Again. If you truly enjoy factory games, please, treat yourself and give this one a try. It's not perfect, despite reviews it never was. It's great though. Anyway - back to playing.