Mindustry

This game could be great and seems like the gameplay is pretty good. The biggest issue however, are the controls. I spent maybe 3 hours on this game trying to get the hang of the controls and leaving room for the possibility I was partly at fault but it is incredibly aggravating trying to do anything, especially building. For example: Some buttons don’t work on initial clicks. There’s an annoying dragging mechanic when building that I cannot figure out what is causing it, resulting in all of the buildings I’ve placed to all be shifted x tiles to wherever I dragged it and since I can’t replicate it, I have to start over. While this dragging mechanic wouldn’t be a huge issue, the best way of placing conveyer belts is via dragging. You can’t place the laser drills unless they are facing towards the ore. At that point, why not just either: let me place it anyways or auto correct the direction. This is especially irritating when you’re trying to just plan out distances and where you want to place things. There’s also another issue I’d run into where the highlight of a building I’m trying to place disappears. The UI itself is questionable, my issue with it being that it just feels clunky and unresponsive at times. I also still have no idea what the wrench icon does although, I didn’t finish the “tutorial”, which was passable but could’ve been much better. I was really hoping for a replacement to games like Factorio and such but for mobile and while I definitely think it could be, I couldn’t keep playing while wanting to bash my head in trying to use the controls.

The game has good graphics, but is poorly play balanced. The dev wanted to challenge a few, but at a cost of frustrating the many. My time is more valuable to waste it on something that isn’t fun. Players will spend hours micro managing their resource collection and defense system, which will be destroyed by an overly powered guardian that can attack from the limits of your attack and quickly destroy your defenses. After countless hours and many attempts, you will eventually struggle and defeat the guardian and capture the sector. You would feel a sense of accomplishment, but it will be short lived. While playing the next sector, you will receive a message that the hard win you spent hours to obtain was lost without your attention, despite adding formidable defenses (impact reactors, cryo fueled meltdowns) after your win. No fun! Sectors with few resources (easy sectors) are attacked after you leave the sector and require resources from other sectors to even try to regain. The enemy difficulty needs to be lowered, and/or a mid-play save option. Attacks on sectors without your attention should be put on hold until you enter the sector…losing without fighting is not fun. 5 cryo fuel meltdowns hitting an air guardian still fails. At the same time, 5 tractor beams won' pull the same air guardian to your row of cryo enhanced thorium tornados. If these defenses don’t work, why try?

This game is really great but there are a few concerns with it, the first major concern being that you cant start the next wave until all the enemies are defeated on the current wave. it would be really nice for when you have a solid defence already built to be able to spawn in multiple waves at a time as it gets boring waiting for all the enemies on a current wave to die. a few other problems are that you lose your building plans when you die so you have to lay them out again, and this also happens when switch to build something else already laid out. My final issue is that you cant switch to fighting without cancelling all building plans. other than that however this game has greatly improved with the updates and I am very happy with how the game has turned out. The level design is different enough between every level to warrant playing them and the unlock tree is a great addition that rewards collecting rescources. all in all great concept for a game that really works. Im looking forward to see if there are any new updates.