I originally heard about the game on Hacker News in a comment thread about factorio. But when I played it myself I am slightly disappointed. The first few hours were really fun. I really liked the logistics challenge of building an efficient and well-managed factory, from minute details like how to orient the machines, to big-picture decisions like which level 3 cure to develop when funds are very limited. I really enjoyed solving those kinds of puzzles. However, after having accumulated perhaps half a dozen of hours of play, I no longer find the game enjoyable: it was too repetitive! You start to learn to find patterns in all of the decisions you make, and find that, once you have the experience, almost *all* of them can be easily automated. Want to find out how to place a particular piece of equipment, or how to arrange them so that they use the least belts and take up the least space? It is a tedious optimisation problem easily done by programming. Want to find out which drug to develop? Instead of trawling through different tabs and mentally doing calculations (this cure requires 2 $600 dissolvers/evaporators and 1 higher priced agglomerator, etc), how about give me all the raw data in a neat table and let me write a few SQL statements to find out the total cost of developing such a drug? I'm pretty sure real companies have the means to do so. And I find the real-world events quite useless. A real CEO is supposed to interact with the rest of society and predict those information in advance; she might be presented with conflicting information in fact. This is what requires true judgement, not just crunching numbers in Excel. But in this game, the elements of society are almost entirely absent. Maybe I'm biased because I'm just a programmer and like more geeky games, but overall, given the fun first few hours I'd give the game three stars.
