Nerd Girl Thoughts

Developer: Erik Asmussen
Release Date: November 17, 2021
MSRP: $19.99

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If you like city builders with automation, super cute graphics, and have almost infinite patience & time, well, then Factory Town might just be your new favorite game. Ok, so I may be going a little harsh here, but as someone who does really like city builders with automation, and is fine with all my workers looking like Weebles, I found that this game tried my patience. Not solely because there appears to only be two settings (paused or unpaused) for the passage of time, I played for well over an hour on the first introductory campaign scenario. See, I built myself into a corner, as it were, and needed to restart because I couldn’t figure out how to unbuild something.

When I did it again, I was bound and determined to find a way to get rid of the part that was mucking everything up, and if you go into the build menu under tools, there’s a “remove block” button, which will take out a section of path or conveyor belt. There’s also a different option to remove a resource, allowing you to get rid of anything in your way that you didn’t put there. I feel like these are very basic things in this genre, and they should not be hard to find.

Which is to say, there may also be speed settings, but those I did not find.

The tutorial is actually pretty solid, but it takes quite a bit before you can get to the “factory” part of Factory Town. You have to grow your town big enough to unlock your first research level, and you have quite a few steps of research to do before you can build the most basic wooden conveyor belt. Everything prior to this point requires you to have a little worker weeble to harvest resources, and bring them either to a production building, storage area, or shop. If you are, say, turning wood into planks, you’re then going to want another worker weeble to pick up the planks, and then take those where you need them to be. If, like me, you tend to build in tight little clusters to minimize walking time, you are going to be screwed when it comes time to build those automated stuff movers. You just won’t have any space for them.

In the end, I did manage to complete the first scenario with a single, sad conveyor belt. It was a frustrating start for me, who wouldn’t have minded if workers were all I had, so I can’t imagine how annoyed an factory-focused player would have been. The fact that it’s pretty economically simplistic might be either a pro or a con, depending on a player’s taste, but the absolute density of the menus is not doing this game any favors.

This probably isn’t a city builder game I’ll be returning to, although I’m a big fan of the genre. I have many far more user friendly city building games sitting unplayed in my library, and without the ability to (easily?) increase the game speed, I found myself bored pretty much any time I wasn’t frustrated. This is a game that should have been for me, but there are some quality of life features I’m not willing to do without in this type of game, and the obtuseness of the build menus was a big turn off as well.

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