This game seems really good, and on the surface pretty polished. But even from 1 hour in, it gives the feeling "it's polished but missing soul". Here are some glaring problems, in my eyes: 1) There are no ambient sounds. This stings particularly hard when the music stops abruptly mid track. 2) The whole thing could be forgiven if the "aesthetic" parts worked well, but they're missing vital parts: a plain aesthetic tile floor would make a huge difference. Also corners for hedges, that kind of thing. 3) Menus behave weirdly. E.g. some close when you try to go back, some don't. And the aesthetic menu gets so small you can't see it without squinting. 4) Translation is a bit poor, more importantly the "tutorial" messages overlook things that are vital to passing the tutorial. (e..g. build a warehouse) 5) There's no "tolerance". You either have level 4 buildings in an area, or you have level 3. This makes it feel like a computer program, not a city. 6) Challenge is missing. This wouldn't be a bad thing, if the building cool looking cities worked. These things wouldn't take much effort to fix. And if fixed I can imagine spending a long time building the cool looking cities. Right now, after 1 hour playing the tutorials I've built a sandbox city with basically every service working in it, but I don't feel an urge to improve it - and I wish I did.
It's very like SpaceChem, except you have a large space to work in and you can use as many of anything as you like. This works really, really well - it lets you stomp out a quick and dirty solution, then work out something incredibly smart (or stupid). So.. without further reference to its 2D ancestor, what is it? It's a puzzle game where you place 3D blocks (movers, welders, drills) which manipulate a stream of inputs with the goal of building something, with that something changing level by level. Each level makes you do something slightly more advanced, and the later levels get quite challenging. The controls are very good, building is easy the puzzles get steadily harder and harder, and the possibilities are huge - there must be hundreds of ways to approach the different challenges. I have played 20 hours of Infinifactory on 'that-other-service', and I've still not completed all the puzzles. I've loved every minute of it - and when I wasn't actually playing, I had little factories whirring in my head - just like Tetris or Minesweeper used to do.
