Good Company

I have really tried to like this game, but it is broken. I don't understand how the Devs could've believed this game was ready for release. Especially when several of the core functions of the game don't work properly. Here are some examples. Imagine a row of shelves 3 tall and 3 wide. The middle column of shelves is full and the outer two are completely empty. A worker goes to put an item on a shelf in the middle column, but it's full. What do you think they should do? You would think the AI was smart enough to think "Hey this shelf is full, I'll put it on the one next to it". Nope! They just stand there..forever. At least until someone else takes something off that shelf, but what if nobody does. Well you now have a workstation that's producing nothing. So I tried telling that workstation to override the output to put everything directly on the outgoing pallet. Does the AI take the new direction and act on it? Nope! It continues to sit there and stare at the full shelf. The only way to fix this is fire the employee and hire a new one. Which you might think is fine, except the game has an employee experience system that makes them more efficient as they level up. So there's another mechanic that's basically broken because firing stuck employees such a regular occurrence that you're lucky if any employee hangs round long enough to not get stuck by one means or another. And believe me, this is far from the only cause for an AI to get stuck. Then if you manage to suffer that for long enough, you get to unlock conveyors and machines... All I can say is this is probably one of, if not the most broken conveyor systems I've ever seen. Machines are too big for buildings that are too small and the buildings that "are" big enough, have crap like pillars that constantly get in the way. Then, even if you do fill the logistics, machines still go without resources because logistics employees are too stupid to spread the resources to keep everything fed.

In the first hours I didn't get the logistic system and made everything manual which was a disaster, but after playing the campaign which explains the game very well I understand how it works and playing this game became a blast. but still there is room for improvement but for that price I got now 22 hours of fun and still not finished. One of tycoon games which can get deep without looking ugly.

The game itself has a lot of potential. Long tech trees, continuous improvements, research, business logic... However it comes with a huge issue in it's gameplay. Since you need to improve your products with time (e.g. your first audio player comes with mono speakers but a later one offers stereo sound) you always need to rearrange your factory. But that process comes with so many chores that it becomes annoying quickly - even though in theory this is really great. Not only does that lead to a lot of unused products loitering around in your storage (e.g. the mentioned mono speakers or other low quality items) and you manually need to arrange them etc. But also the whole production flow becomes annoying quickly since you need to manage things that shouldn't be in need of managing. Imagine you need a new product but the factory is getting small (they are always too small) so you move the production of the new item (e.g. the stereo speaker) to another production hall. Now you need to organise the flow of items between the old and the new hall since some electronic components are still used in other processes. But that "splitting" of resources is really ugly made. It is complicated, requires too many clicks and also is badly visualized. So you usually end up messing things up here. Same for easy stuff like selling products. Again you create transport paths that work (badly) but then you need to prepare that item for selling. But the whole process becomes so annoyingly complex that it is just not fun. Especially when you have a hand full of old unused items you want to sell "manually". You put them in the shelves, create a new item for the selling, wait until it got sold, then delete that selling unit again (because there won't come more of them). For a game that focusses on producion and selling of items this is simply not acceptable. This is sad since the general gameplay of designing products and producing them is really fun!

...but it's badly implemented! I really tried to enjoy the game but, the resource management is a nightmare! The AI is bad, often as others say despite providing additional storage spaces (and yes manually assigning the appropriate item to be storred there) the worker just hangs in one spot with a box of components/products in his/her hands and does nothing. The assignments that are implemented, while a great idea sometimes does not work! Half-way through filling my pallet the workers just stop and stand with the product in hand ( and yes paltte is not full) The Item design and markets are amazing ideas but just like others pointed out the floor managment is too tedious and making even one small change to the production line (in later stages) takes hundreds of unnecessary clics and way to many menus to adjust the production. To sum things up like most other reviewers said this game has great ideas and systems but badly implemented and further product upgrades are unnecessarily complicated and annoying ofter breaking the entire chain.