Steel Mill Manager

There is not a lot that is fun here. If you are really bored, it is some busy work in the way that the activity boards you might attach to a toddlers crib will keep you pushing buttons and honking horns, all for nothing. The game is quite buggy. For example in the second factory, if you upgrade all three ships all the way, it will eventually give you a quest to update a fourth ship which doesn’t exist. This will effectively lock you out of further progression in the quest queue. Another problem is that layout of the conveyor belts is infuriatingly inefficient and bad. There is no option to redesign the factory unlike factories or the half dozen games of that ilk. You are stuck with the ill conceived factory layout which leaves your workers starved for raw materials and largely wasting time until the next break. When they do have raw materials, they likely aren’t working anyway, because their machinery is broken. The AI which powers the repairmen is similarly inexcusably horrible. There is no attempt to take multiple jobs near one another. They will often walk past six broken machines in order to fix one on the opposite side of the map. If they have enough supplies for multiple fixes, often they will go back to their home room to restock anyway, walking past a half dozen broken machines on the way. After about the first hour of gameplay, the game becomes utterly stingy with new workers. I have factories with workrooms that have never had a manager because not enough spawn. Likewise once your initial quota of 30 or so workers runs out. You never get any more and have to hire temp workers who never advance. This is in the end one of those pay to win, waiting games designed to leave you frustrated. In short, it is a pay to wait game. Do yourself a favor and pick something else that is actually well designed and fun.

So at a certain point of progress in the game there is an task in multiple factories to upgrade scrap truck 4 to level 3. There’s 4 slots for trucks, but only 3 trucks to unlock. Wish that would get fixed.

This is a fun game. I like this type of game, and of the ones I’ve played, I like this one the best. However, there is a BIG bug that gets really annoying. I’ll play for a bit, upgrade as much as much as I can afford, etc., then switch over to other games for a while, and when I come back to this one after about 20 or 30 minutes, my factory has made ZERO money, ZERO progress. If I leave for several hours, or overnight, I get a window when I come back where I can see my offline earnings. Also mildly annoying is the music. It doesn’t really loop well.