Meister
It is a game that collects materials, makes goods, sells money, and repairs a time machine.
First collect resources such as iron, wood, and stone. It can be made into swords, shields, arrows, etc., or you can add them to the defense of the castle.
If you have enough money, you can hire someone to help you. They will gather resources like you, or make something. Even sales and delivery!
Time to spare time machine is completely repaired and return to the future will win!
Read More: Best Strategy Indie Games.
shapez.io
This is a great game! Two thumbs up!
Now, this is definitely a puzzle game in the vein of games like Factorio where you have to create long complicated conveyor belts to connect various shapes and colors together to create outputs of ever-increasing form. Unlike other games in this genre, including the previous game made by Tobspr, this is just what it is. There’s no monsters, aliens or zombies at night: you just have to build ever-more-complicated shapes to unlock various upgrades and to win the various levels. It’s very relaxing in a zen sort of way as there’s no way to fail: at worst you build a slightly wrong shape and can adjust the various cutting and rotating widgets as necessary.
– Real player with 170.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Building Games.
First, ignore my play time - I have in the region of 40+ hours of playtime racked up from the itch.io version.
Shapez.io is a logistical conveyor-belt game much in the same vein as Factorio or Factory Town, but with an element of puzzle about it in that you must manufacture different shapes using a mixture of cutting tools, rotation and paint in your factory processes (anyone who’s ever played the excellent Flash series Factory Balls will be instantly at home, and for anyone who hasn’t yet, you know what you need to do after downloading and playing shapez.io)!
– Real player with 119.7 hrs in game
Automation Empire
I wanted to like this game, I really did. I put in a bunch of time so I could experience all versions and content of the game. Here is some of what I noticed:
1: There is no need to progress beyond steel plates and gold, you can win every map by using only those 2 material exports.
2: Every map is absolutely 100% identical when it comes to resources. They all have the same amount of iron, coal, gold and oil nodes.
3: Late game means severe and I do mean severe lag. 1 frame/2 seconds is not out of the ordinary on a game load.
– Real player with 333.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Base Building Games.
First I thoroughly enjoy this game, and it does have its ups and downs, but I cannot recommend it more highly.
I would like to address my opinion on what most negative reviews have to say. These are my opinion only. YMMV.
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it is not a sandbox or an optimization game. It is a puzzle race against the clock.
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It is NOT Factorio, that’s not a fault, it is just different. Why make a clone of another game?
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It does not have blueprints. - Part of the gameplay is to continually rebuild factories in new and different styles to match each level of tech you unlock, staying ahead of the tax curve. Blueprints would reduce this part of game play into cloning rubber stamps all over the map, and limits creativity and ingenuity.
– Real player with 209.4 hrs in game
Captain of Industry
Captain of Industry is a construction and management simulation game where you and your loyal crew escaped to an abandoned island to start a new colony after the world has spiraled into chaos. In order to survive, you will need to mine raw materials, harvest food, build factories, manufacture products, construct vehicles, research new technologies, and explore your surroundings. If you are successful, you can even start a space program, build rockets, and assemble your own space station! With all that power and technology, you might be even able to end the word chaos. It’s all in your hands.
Manufacture products
Start simple - smelt iron, mix concrete, create construction parts, and grow food. Soon you will be able to expand into crude oil processing, electronics, solar panels, datacenters, and even rocket parts. There are over 100 unique products to work with!
Build efficient factories
To build an industrial empire, you need to be clever. Place machines carefully to connect them more efficiently with conveyor belts. Refine raw resources close to their mining location to save fuel needed for transportation.
Shape fully dynamic terrain
No mountain is tall enough for your fleet of excavators! You can shape your island to your will - build natural bridges and ramps to access remote areas. Are you running out of space? How about dumping some rocks into the ocean to create new land!
Mine raw resources
Find the natural riches of your land and use them to expand your factories. Mine coal, iron, copper, gold, or pump underground water!
Farm your land
You need to feed your people. Start basic by growing some potatoes on farms. But this won’t be enough. Later, use fertilizers and advanced greenhouses to keep up with the food demands.
Research new technologies
Research is a must have! Unlock new buildings and materials and make your factory more efficient. New technologies will change the course of your future.
Construct new vehicles
Trucks, excavators, and tree harvesters! Upgrade your fleet to make the most of it but make sure you are producing enough fuel to run all of these heavy machines!
Explore the world
Repair and upgrade your ship with better engines, armor, and weapons. Explore your surroundings, find refugees, discover more resources, and be ready for naval battles!
Factorization
This is sadly a hard no. I reviewed it right upon release and mostly complained about small basic quality of life things like zooming in and out and laying down conveyors by dragging instead of clicking each tile. There was an update that added a lot of that stuff so I gave it another go! I played for another 6 hours! no bueno
The workers completely ruin the look and flow of the game. They also blatantly glitch out. In my 6 hours I had to restart I think 4 or 5 times due to the workers just completely stopping. It always happened when I would add a few more workers or upgrade a few of them. I’d restart the game, change nothing and magically they would go back to work. Even when the workers do their jobs it’s just annoying to have to manage that. If there were an interface for worker upgrades or something maybe but there is no such thing. so you have to click on each one to upgrade them.
– Real player with 6.5 hrs in game
OK, this is awesome, it took me a bit, but Awesome
I am finally making some money now, (well going back up now ) :-)
better than I thought and I know it will get better and better!!!
– Real player with 2.9 hrs in game
The Perfect Tower II
I have been playing this game on early access for 2 months now (since apparently we’re flexing playtime in reviews I have 1475 hours). I’ve played a lot of idle games before but this is the first one that managed to keep me hooked more then a few days. There are a few reasons for that :
- the content is very varied, much more then any other idle game I’ve seen before, with a lot of different buildings that feel like different games but somehow tie together really well (you can fight bosses, optimize a factory that feels a lot like modded Minecraft, or try to get the highest possible scores in the various experiments of the laboratory, and a lot more…)
– Real player with 5474.0 hrs in game
I don’t typically do reviews. Usually someone else said it better and didn’t take 13 pages to say it. But for whatever reason I felt the urge to hear my own sweet Cherry keystrokes and here we are. Hi.
First off, this is probably one of the most, if not thee most advanced TD variant out there. It’s extremely involved and has system upon system that initially don’t seem too connected but everything assuredly is. Don’t go into this expecting Desktop Tower Defense 1.5 (My first TD game back on Kong). This will take hours to fully understand if you go in blind and don’t read a guide. The ingame help wasn’t much help when I started and the updates to it still don’t seem like they would be too helpful. But if you stick to it, the systems and loop aren’t in some foreign language and can be figured out with some time and effort.
– Real player with 1183.8 hrs in game
Assembly Planter
After 25 hours here are my thoughts.
This is my first assembly automation style game I’ve played that I can remember. Initially I was drawn to the fact it had a loose similarity to farming style games (ie: Stardew Valley). I wasn’t sure I was going to like it, but ended up kinda of digging the experience. I’ve watched people play Factorio, Satisfacory and Astroneer and this reminded me of those games in many aspects as far as the automation went.
The interface is a bit awkward in the game was the first thing that struck me as far as mechanics go. Your hotbar is a bit of a mess sometimes because you can’t lock items in place that you commonly use. It was a bit of a frustration to me, but one I got used to after about 30 minutes of playing it. The mechanics are straight-forward; pick something, pick a spot, execute the action.
– Real player with 33.6 hrs in game
TL;DR: Simple enough, but ends up being a numbers game where you’re constantly just reorganizing farms you’ve already set up slowing your progress.
The only bug I’ve noticed is that Packed Sand is not included in the filter splitter options. Devs, please fix.
So basically, you start out “farming” on your own. Then you unlock machines that plant and harvest for you as well as collect all the drops. Then you get an area to design a new machine where you can put the planters and harvesters so the new machine automatically produces items for you. Then, you can expand that area to allow you to produce even more items! (the reorganizing farms idea from above) The machines and setting them up are not that complicated either. There’s really no “fancy” setups. It’s really simple, but it then turns into a numbers game of “this machine produces 5/s, but this machine needs 6/s so I can waste 1/s or build 3 of this one and 4 of this one and split this output into 3 and then 2 and then divert these over to this machine….” and it’s just unfun at that point. You pretty much progress towards a “re inserter collector” and then you redo your machines. Then, you get a transmutation table that turns dirt into wood or wood into copper or copper into iron, etc and you have to redo your machines again. In my honest opinion, they need to get rid of the transmutation table. I think if you are to play this game, do not use the transmutation table and you will have more fun. I’m just going to do that on my next run.
– Real player with 28.9 hrs in game
Factory Magnate
Factory Magnate is part factory builder, part business tycoon. It puts you in the shoes of an industrious factory engineer with a small loan of a million credits. Your goal is to build an empire of factories spanning multiple planets in a procedurally generated solar system. You seek to dominate the solar system through sheer wealth and influence, not military might or political power.
AUTOMATION BY DEFAULT
You don’t control a character and you can place factory buildings anwyhere, as long as you have the money to do so. This takes the “early game” known from other similar games out of the equation, because you jump straight to automation and skip all the manual labor.
NO CRAFTING
It’s all about the money.. because in this game, money is your most important resource.
You don’t craft buildings, you buy them.
PROFIT IS EVERYTHING
You earn money selling your goods to the locals. They seem to have an endless supply of money to throw at you, but if you saturate the market, prices will drop - possibly making your factories operate at a loss. It’s up to you to strike a balance.
THE FACTORY NEVER SLEEPS
At the core of the game sits the main challenge: the factory is always running, and you must pay upkeep. If you’re not selling enough to make a profit, you’ll soon be out of business.
You. Must. Keep. Selling.
uFactory
I believe someone already said somewhere that uFactory feels like what we would get after Factory and BigPharma had a baby. As much as I enjoyed both of those games, uFactory feels like it hits the sweet spot for me in many ways. With the limited space and funds, maximising every level is super satisfying and with the products of your factory being so different every time, it feels fresh and it doesn’t get boring at all (awesome way to prevent having to do the same thing at the start over and over again).
– Real player with 146.0 hrs in game
uFactory is well worth the price! I appreciate the method the game uses to coach you through the required machinery and resources. Too many games these days give you a play-by-play walk through and ruin the challenge. Let me elaborate, you are required to look through a “Manual” which presents the information as if it were taken as notes and sketched in a notebook. This information will guide you on what order to set up your machinery and what resources are required. Figuring out how to deliver said resources at the proper time can be quite challenging! After you have spent hours playing and have mastered the art of delivering resources and parts at the proper time, you can then spend hours upon hours tweaking your factory to higher and higher efficiencies. uFactory also contains some “Hard modes” by allowing you to process raw resources into more elaborate components that would be simply bought in “Easier mode”. I happen to be an Automation Engineer in profession and have found the game quite entertaining yet challenging. If you are a perfectionist as I am, you will enjoy hours of fun tweaking your factory until you cannot squeeze any additional production or profit from it. I recommend this game and am eagerly awaiting expansions/updates! As for cons… At this time, the game is in early access and a few achievements are not working correctly. And, of course, you are bound to find a few bugs. However, if you save often, I have not found any game-breaking bugs, and I have been able to complete all scenarios without major issue. Good luck!
– Real player with 65.7 hrs in game
Factorio
The absolute gold standard in factory games, standing out as the exemplar of smooth progression curves, options out the ears, gameplay that keeps the “one more turn” itch going and developers that care far beyond selling copies. To elevator pitch this one, “If you can do it, you can automate it.”
To describe Factorio by only using games that preceded it feels like an exercise in futility. The concept was born from Minecraft mods, but it feels unfair to compare the two or make the Terraria reference (this, but in 2D). So, taken on its own, Factorio is a game where you play an engineer who is trying to escape the situation they are in by building a rocket. But since the refining and assembling of material components for that sort of thing is unfeasible by yourself, you must build a factory to automate the process. Along the way you must research concepts and upgrades for the planet you are on, mine resources and deal with the locals (in the form of giant insects).
– Real player with 3172.1 hrs in game
I read a comment by a user saying “If you enjoy creating your own problems and solving them this is for you.” and he was bang on the money.
tl;dr
The knock-on effect caused by dependencies across an entire production chain will drive you nuts and it’s this that makes you play and I mean MAKES you play. Sleep is not an option.
Factorio
Engineers rejoice. Learn Technology, Automation and Efficiency in one easy to learn package. No? Seriously. this is a hard game to put down.
– Real player with 1654.2 hrs in game