I really really like management games, you can see that from my recent adoration of Startup panic down to my long-standing obsessive relationship with the Anno series of games. After my experience with Computer Tycoon I was apprehensive but I have never played any games by Turquoise Revival Games so I wanted to try it out. Lurkit made that happen, and you can see my first play here.

The premise is that you manage your very own factory but your workers are robots who initially start out by making toys. In our first playthrough we opted for rubber ducks, drum kits and teddy bears.

Its a very easy game to get into with a really straight forward tutorial that Computer Tycoon could learn a lot from. It was also very reminiscent of Two Point hospital in terms of room creation and hardware placement.

There is a lot I really like about this game.

You get plenty of info on what the market wants at the time (we crashed the duck market due to over saturation, but… ducks), the planning tree make sure that you have all the hardware needed for production and you have to link it all together; and the robots are hecking cute.

In terms of wider controls & graphics, I would have liked greater freedom of movement with the camera and brighter from the offset – but these are minimal issues.

On my subsequent play-throughs I got to grips with upgrade points for the robots (as I started with the cheapest ones this time) as well as RND points (you get one for ever level your factory grows by). I was also able to start to balance my sustainability by planting trees etc to off-set the carbon footprint.

I also managed to go bankrupt a few times in getting the balance of output/profit & timings a bit wrong. It is slow in order to get your factory always in the black and I think the game suffers from not having production objectives or something to work towards (like a Christmas rush) in terms of what you need to be producing at any one time (like how Organs Please needs you to make X in one work day).

The slowness also made this a challenging game to stream, I had the speed on X10 to make it a bit faster the community said that unlike Two Point Hospital, there isn’t enough to do at any one time – and I am inclined to agree. On subsequent playthroughs (I have clocked up nearly 2 hours now already) a lot of the time was spent waiting to fulfil orders so I can start a new one. If I tried to do two at once I fell into the red but I wanted to do more than one so I had more to do.

We do like this game in house Shiney though and I eager to see what the full release on March 24th will look like.

Shiney rating
3 paws out of 5
Its a nice little game that is easy to start with but harder to fully master. There are challenges in balancing output and profit and the game does suffer from a slower play pace (which is not what you would expect from a 24/7 factory). It does have a lot of depth though and is really put together – I would like to see how the RND plays out more when you can get past level 5 so our review is limited by the experience you are able to have in that regard. We are looking to the full release so we can fine tune our factory floor to perfection.