Factory Planner

[b]Great concept, but the late game is too messy and unfinished to recommend right now[/b] The first hours are really enjoyable. Discovering how everything works feels fresh, especially because buildings are represented as cards, with inputs and outputs that you connect together. Building production chains, upgrading things, and slowly expanding the factory is fun at the beginning. Unfortunately, the further you get, the more the game starts to fall apart. For a factory-building game, there is not enough metering or production information. You can only see the overall balance of resources, not the production of individual buildings or specific production lines. Sometimes the statistics also seem unreliable. I had a case where the counter got stuck and only showed the correct value after restarting the game. Because of this, it becomes very hard to understand what is actually happening in your factory. The late game also becomes extremely chaotic. Once you have hundreds or even thousands of cards on the board, it is very difficult to manage what goes where. The overlay that shows connections is useful, but it does not solve the bigger problem: you still have to manually search through everything and check production lines by hand. There are also serious bugs. I encountered a very severe exploration bug: under some conditions, when exploration is finished and you press the “complete exploration” button, nothing happens. After that, the game can get stuck in a broken state where you cannot properly move or copy cards. The workaround is to find the strange items with millions of units and sell them, after which you can finally complete the exploration and continue playing. But for this kind of game, that is a major issue. The UI also has problems. The quest log is confusing: newly accepted missions appear at the end of an internally scrolling list, so I did not even realize where they were for many hours. Because of that, I did not understand how to complete missions properly until much later. This is not just a minor inconvenience — it directly affects progression. The game also gives you too many missions and events. If you complete them regularly, you almost automatically explore and unlock territory, and you end up feeling way ahead of the intended progression when it comes to research points. Instead of feeling balanced, the mission system often feels like it floods you with rewards and pushes progression too quickly. Another issue is that the game does not feel actively developed right now. The last patch was months ago, and there have not been meaningful fixes or new features recently. I completed the story, missions, achievements, and hub levels, and the game simply ends without a satisfying conclusion. I understand that it is Early Access, but it still feels very unfinished. The tech tree is also too bloated. There are too many separate item chains, and after you learn how to build one, you often just repeat the same process manually again and again. Many late-game items are needed only in tiny amounts, but still require setting up extra buildings and lines. It becomes more tedious than interesting. The upgrade requirements could be much more streamlined. Power lines are another feature that feels unnecessary. Having to route separate power connections adds even more clutter to an already messy board. I think the game would be better if buildings were powered automatically as long as you produced enough power overall. The game also lacks important quality-of-life features, such as undo, better card copying, and automated exploration. Later on, exploration has to be repeated manually, which becomes annoying rather than fun. When something goes wrong or cards get scattered because there is no space, fixing it manually is also frustrating. Overall, I really liked the beginning of the game. The core idea is clever and fun, and there is definitely potential here. But in its current state, the game becomes too chaotic, buggy, poorly explained, and unfinished in the late game. I cannot recommend it right now unless you are okay with Early Access roughness and a lot of manual frustration.