Factory Town

Factory Town started as a very simplistic resource management game many years back in Early Access. But even after releasing it's 1.0, it still has many of the same issues I had with the game from the beginning. [h1]The Bad - General complains[/h1] Every game is exactly the same. There's no deviation of your progression because of it's very linear tech tree, no threat and no other random factors or events. Maps are quite small and seemingly not meant for long plays. It's gives the impression that there's just not much to do in the game. From the beginning there's a ton of micro-management and it doesn't get less in the late game. The happiness mechanic is boring and not an interesting way to make you build more complex things. The storage and distribution of resources not really great. Just place a barn wherever and it's contents are accessible everywhere. Because of that, you don't have to deal with distribution, because ... well, it doesn't really exist. [h1]The Bad - Logistics[/h1] Logistic blocks are a nightmare to use and unnecessarily confusing Logistic blocks will fill your screen with flashing and blinking lines and icons You rarely need more than the "grabber" calling in question the reason for the existing of the other ones Workers can put things directly on conveyor belts. you need to build a chute that they put the item in so it is dropped onto the conveyor belts. Wood pipes are more than good enough to transport water, so why do other types of pipes exists? Physics do not exist and bridges can be build without any support, so scaffold and buildings can hover in the air Conveyor belts have no corner piece unlike chutes, which is plain ugly [h1]The Bad - AI[/h1] The Worker AI is really bad sometimes. It will choose longer paths to travel for seemingly no reason at all. Certain entities like wagons tend to deadlock themselves because they cannot clip through each other. Sadly there's no one-way road to circumvent the issue. AI can't do diagonal movement. This gets especially ridiculous and annoying, when you have wider roads on use boats on water. [h1]The Bad - Visuals[/h1] The UI is just terrible for all but the simplest tasks. Using the many menus just doesn't feel great or makes much sense sometimes. There is little to no explanation in the menu of what each building or logistic block is doing. Buildings with upgrades do not look different from the ones without. You have to select each building to know if it has an upgrade or not. The town you build feels empty and hollow. Except for the workers, there's just nothing moving or producing sounds. Decorations do not exist. There's no different designs for houses. They look all the same like some dystopian soviet-era parody. Due to the simplistic graphics, the game looks so forgettable. I can barely tell it apart from other cartoony tile-based resource management games. [h1]The Good[/h1] The music sounds fine but is not something that you will listen to on its own nor will remember in the future. Although the games graphics look generic, it's still very consistent in all it's design. No items or building looks "out of place", as if all of the pieces come from the same box.