Vectorio

I am going to have to say no. If some things improve I might change my mind. The game actually looks decent. The graphics are simple, but look functional enough at a glance. I have poked at the wiki a little and I can see it has some depth. And the price asked, is not unreasonable for what is offered here. But I am really struggling with this one. It boils down to to the UI, and QOL. To explain, let me talk a moment about drones, factories, and the UI itself. Drones are the backbone of your economy. You need them to transport every resource. You will need to combine resources in factories to make other resources, which you will also have to transport, using even more drones. To configure one drone, you will need to first click a cargo port, then click edit clusters, then select where to transport from, and then finally ( with a little luck ) select where to transport to. So at minimum, you are looking at four clicks for each and every drone. And that only works if it auto-selects the correct resource which it will often not do. If it does not, you will need to go back, click the cargo port again, find and click the small unobtrusive hamburger menu in the bottom right, and finally click the right resource. So you are looking at at least four, and often seven clicks simply to configure one drone. This might sound silly, but this is a lot of clicks. You will need a lot of drones. You will have to repeat this tedious process for each and every one of the many drones you will need to play this game. Next are the factories themselves. By definition you will need multiple drones to handle each factory. Configuring a factory, is very similar to configuring a drone, and like the drone, you still cannot multi-select. And of course, you will often want more than one factory. And there are many different resources. You will need to configure every single factory. And then you will need to configure all the drones needed to transport things to and from these factories just to make them work. The only good thing I can say here, is that adjacent factories, count as one "cluster" so you can point your drones at the factory group and it will treat it all as one big factory. You still need to click each individual factory and set the recipe first. The repetitive tedium in these two basic things, drones, and factories, is very real. Even doing just the bare minimum to make something work at all, is a lot. Trying to scale up to make things go faster, is nightmare fuel. And you still need to figure out what you need to feed into a factory to make it go. Your only clue here, will be a tiny dark shape of a resource you may or may not yet know how to find or make. I have learned that many resources do not have a unique shape to help you identify it. And even those that do are difficult to distinguish with how small the shapes are. The UI is my final challenge in the game. It has very little to say. What little text there is is tiny and often unhelpful. I have squinted and managed to find the tiny little slider to bump up the UI size a tiny amount to make it slightly more tolerable, but most of the text is still tiny. We are not talking about main screen elements where keeping things small, and unobtrusive might be desirable. We are talking about tiny text, in tiny boxes, floating around in largely empty menu screens. There's just no reason for it. There is plenty of space to make these things larger and more readable. There is plenty of space for some helpful text to explain things. But you will find none of that here. Of the very little information available in these menus, the resource menu is the least terrible. Here at least you will find shapes in full color indicating what resources you will need to research things. But when it comes to figuring out how to produce anything to create T2 and higher materials, you will struggle to find any helpful information. I am not very far into the game. My latest puzzle has been trying to figure out how to make Arcane Steel. Looking at a factory to make it, I see three mysterious dark shapes. None of them are the familiar shapes of any resource that I am currently harvesting or producing. Of course mousing over these shapes, tells me nothing. It doesn't even give me a name. I have poked through what little information is available in the UI and found nothing. I have gone out to the wiki, and it has given me clues about two ( liquid essence, and Iridium ) of the three dark shapes that are now taunting me. According to the wiki, they are all I need. So I built a return portal to get back to the original region, and tried making some Arcane Steel. This didn't work of course. My Factory still sits idle, taunting me. I have a theory about that third shape. I think it might be a new resource in the Abyss that might not yet be in the wiki. I think I may need to move my operation back to the abyss, and construct my steel there, but I have not yet bothered to try that yet. Instead I decided that enough, was enough, and I started writing this review instead. I admit, I don't yet know if I am just missing something simple, or if the wiki is incomplete. I don't know that I can find it within me to care. I have glanced through the wiki, and I can see that there are many resources I have not yet seen. There are many T1, T2, T3, and even T4 resources, I have not yet seen. I am not looking forward to any of that. I am dreading it. The enormous amount of tedium of configuring the countless drones and factories I would no doubt need to do any of that sounds positively exhausting. And trying to figure out how to find or make any of that stuff with a poor UI and a wiki that I strongly suspect is incomplete, does not sound at all like fun. The UI, and QOL in general with this game, needs some serious work. And until I see some evidence that any of that might change one day, I am going to have to just say no.

I think the potential is there. Overall, it’s a fun game, but it lacks some things. QOL: Little things like a hotbar swap key, blueprints maybe, selecting multiple buildings to delete at once (or maybe even move them), and a way out from the abyss if you get stuck. BUGS: I had a few bugs, but it’s still in early access, so I think that’s okay. I was missing some content that I saw in the trailer, like enemy bases and, I think, even some buildings. I also don’t like the enemy scaling at all. At some point, it’s just turret spam—then you don’t have energy, so you build more energy, and then you need more turrets. Even if that might not sound that good, I still enjoyed playing it.

Vectorio has a really cool concept. The mix of tower defense, automation, and supply chain management makes for a unique and satisfying gameplay loop, and building an efficient base while defending against waves can be very fun. However, the biggest issue is the development pace and multiplayer stability. The community has been waiting for Update 3.0 for over a year and a half, which was supposed to be the huge update for the game (originally planned as 2.0). Unfortunately, progress has been extremely slow. Multiplayer is also still very buggy, to the point where playing with friends often becomes frustrating or simply not playable. For a game that could be amazing in co-op, this is a major downside. The core gameplay is genuinely enjoyable, but right now the slow development and unstable multiplayer make it hard to recommend. I really hope the game improves in the future, because the idea behind it has a lot of potential.

I've been following the game for several years, and there's still no blueprint functionality or even simple copy/paste. I don't understand why: in my opinion, the game is literally unplayable without such functionality, since you need to expand, and placing EVERY STRUCTURE PERSONALLY is sophisticated form of torture. Meanwhile, the developers continue to say on their Discord that blueprints or copy/paste are definitely coming, even "sooner rather than later" – but it's already 2026, and I saw similar statements back in 2023. If you search, the developer promised them back in 2021; but blueprints are still missing. Apparently, there was a mod that implemented copy/paste, but it broke with the latest update. Save yourself some time, and don't buy this piece of "game design" and empty promises.

Some more hotkeys and quality of life would make this game amazing. In its current state some things are a little tedious to do but that's fine because it's early access! Being able to queue research would also be great.

current game vs beta 0.3 holy crap to start off with i LOVE THIS IDEA its wondering the current game play with storage and having cargo drones move res around is epic its almost like a factory game with waves of waves and learning the changes in the builds is really cool! the massive area too play with is very enjoyable 0.3 version where the hell did the game go wrong? its like the WHOLE game changed there ITS almost like whole game went from 2 games? i am going to say with out a doubt the new beta version of the game is very slow and lame.... the portals are kinda cool but meh i rather miss building prodction chains of all the diffrent types of things needing to be built and moved around i would STRONGLY advise to have both versions of the game in the same game just a diffrent mode no point in wasting good game play the leveling system and upgrade system is rather nice to have.... all in all current game i give it a 7/10 beta version 5/10