INDUSTRIA

Industria was a pretty short game, you can easily beat it in one sitting. I played it through to the end because I spent my money on it and I'm stubborn, but I would not recommend that you buy it or play it yourself because it's quite a generic and overall just bad game. This game is much more of a survival-horror experience than I thought it was going to be. You spend a lot of time in borderline pitch-black rooms with nothing but a flashlight to see with. The flashlight is also almost constantly dead because it runs on batteries that last approximately two seconds long, and there are never enough of them to actually get you through from point A to point B. That being said, it's still not scary at all because the enemies themselves are not scary. Most of them actually look quite goofy. There is only one enemy type in the game that I thought was actually cool (the sawblade dogs) and they are hardly in the game at all. Industria is very clearly inspired by Resident Evil 2 and Bioshock in a lot of different ways. On the Resident Evil 2 side, you've got saving at typewriters, limited ammunition that has to be scavenged for, and a flashlight which you absolutely have to utilize to see. On the story-side, it's a lot like Bioshock. You're being lead around the game world, guided from level to level by a faceless companion that you never actually meet, and only communicate with via a radio. You are searching for a certain person, who is very blatantly supposed to be a sort of Andrew Ryan type character. They even have massive statues of the guy standing around in the game, so it's quite an on-the-nose reference if you ask me. The story itself feels like a mishmash of Bioshock Infinite and the Metro games, although I won't spoil it. It ends on a cliffhanger that seems to be setting up for the second game, and doesn't answer many questions (although it's a fairly predictable ending that I actually saw coming from the first level). The voice acting is serviceable, however, the writing is a bit uninspiring to say the least. There is no real connection to the main character whatsoever; we know little to nothing about her, or the person we are supposed to care about finding. That's not all that surprising considering that you can beat the entire game in under four hours. There's not much time for any real character development, and given that the game is basically post-apocalyptic, there aren't very many characters to actually interact with in the first place. In fact, there are literally no characters to interact with, now that I think about it. There is only the main character, and the narrator / guide character who tells you where to go and what to do. Overall it was confusing. There are these "library" sections spliced between the levels where you wander around in some black-and-white library dreamworld where you hear voices in your head and watch some strange symbolic stage play unfolding in front of you... none of it made much sense, and it felt very out of place; just a massive waste of time that felt like it was meant to be "deep" or profound in some way, but ultimately just felt like pretentious filler made up to stall your progress in an already short game. The gameplay is very bad. I am saying this as someone who plays a lot of FPS games (Apex, R6, Battlefield, etc). The combat is not very engaging, and is lacking a lot of the basic features that you would expect from a modern-era FPS game. There are four guns total (pistol, SMG, sniper, shotgun), all with no weapon customization, at all. You also have a pick-axe to melee enemies with, for the moments where you run out of ammunition. For a science-fiction game that takes place in a steampunk-esque universe, there is no real creativity to the weapons that you have access to, they are just boring, 20th-century generic weapons. You can not sprint or sidestep backwards, which is a pain. Likewise, you can not vault over surfaces which are higher than the player-character's feet. The movement just overall feels very bad compared to other FPS games. In terms of enemy movement, they all basically just bum rush you, except for the one enemy that has a gun and shoots at you from a distance. I'm not sure if stealth was meant to be a component to this game, it seems like it was but given how linear the game is and how hard it is to go unspotted, it seems like intention here was for you to just blast your way through everything that's in your path. The enemy AI pathfinding seems to just completely break when they do not have a viable route to the player, so they just end up running around randomly like chickens with their heads cut off, and it is extremely goofy looking. There is definitely some unreal-engine slop and straight-up JANK in this game. Small throwable objects do not seem to have any audio when they collide with the environment. Bullet collision detection is bad when shooting through railings. There also seems to be indestructible glass on certain walls, where you can see the enemy, but can not shoot them (even with the sniper). Speaking of walls, there are also invisible walls which are railroading you throughout certain parts of the game, totally preventing you from exploring where you're "not supposed to go". The fall damage is ANNOYING as hell. I also got a bug where nothing on the main menu was selectable, forcing me to do a hard restart and lose progress. Visually, the game is decent, and at certain points it actually looks quite nice. The visual style reminds me a bit of Dishonored, however, it's more realistic, and less stylized. Those moments where the game looks good are more like set pieces rather than actual levels though, because there are some nice visuals on the train rides between locations, but that's not most of the game. Most of the time, you are actually just wandering around in pretty generic environments, like worn-down buildings and abandoned apartments, almost like you're playing a Fallout / STALKER game or something. I had the graphics turned all the way up, including Ray Tracing, and averaged over 130 FPS at 1440p. With Ray Tracing turned off, I was hovering around 250 FPS. This game came out in 2021 but visually looks like something more akin to what you would expect from a AAA game somewhere between 2013-2016-ish. I did not experience any crashes, which is one good thing I can say about the game. Also, I tried at first to play it on Hardcore mode. It is not worth it. There are not enough of the limited save-point locations in the game on this difficulty, especially considering that the only difference on this difficulty seems to be power-scaled enemies that deal half of your health bar in damage per attack, while also simultaneously giving you less ammo to fight them with (which is a pain in the ass considering that your only other option is to kite them and run around - often in pitch black hallways). It also seems that the Steam Achievement for beating the game on Hardcore difficulty was also removed from the game, further lessening my incentive to do so. Overall, this was a very mediocre game. It's clearly a project that had more money and effort poured into it than a student's university assignment, but, it is ultimately just too short, too lacking in gameplay mechanics, too unpolished, and has a much too forgettable story that ultimately is not worth $20.00 or even four hours of your time that you could spend on a better game. Also, I forgot to mention, at the time of me playing this game, they have already released the sequel which came out a few months ago. The sequel is apparently longer than this game only by a very marginal length of time (maybe 2-3 hours at the absolute most), and the game actually has even worse reviews than this one does, despite having what looks like nearly half a decade of development time. Given people's negative perception of the sequel, I will not be picking it up.