Techtonica
I'm a sucker for automation games, but this one didn't really pan out. It's another lesson in Early Access - it's often not worth it unless it's from a studio you trust. I backed this very early on, then the developers started working on laser tag... in a factory game. Development was basically dropped before the game was finished, and rushed out the door as a 1.0. The game was always poorly optimised and instead of fixing that, the studio decided to break the large world map up into tiny floors in the 1.0 patch to hide it. If you're looking for a 3D factory builde, go play Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program. Better still, go back to Factorio again.
Pros
- Gorgeous underground caves teeming with colourful plants
- Great background music
- You scan old broken machines to unlock tech, a bit like Subnautica
- Has a story, voiceovers and cutscenes
- Destructible terrain
Cons
- Devs dropped it partway through early access and declared 1.0, while removing a bunch of stuff from the roadmap
- Machines don't seem to tell you how much they do per minute... which is a MASSIVE problem in a game about optimisation
- Bizarre choices made by the dev team during development - most noticeably laser tag, then changing the entire map structure at 1.0. What's the point of having Early Access if you're going to massively overhaul everything at the last second?
- I hate the mechanic of having research cores. Yeah, you have to be different to factorio, but having a massive stack of objects that are annoying to place and remove, and that make the game slower are not it.
- Copying a building doesn't seem to work
- Not a big fan of having to put foundations down for everything to distribute power. Yeah it's different to power poles, but it's also annoying.