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0 Block Factory is a new, relaxing creative building game that hit the market on July 11th on Steam. In this game, developed by OverPowered Team and published by Shiro Unlimited, you get to build and optimize factories to create your own 3D figurines from building bricks.
A Solid Foundation?
My hopes for this game were pretty high, but unfortunately, some early performance issues let me down quite a bit. I don’t believe that it’s a bad game, but it sure took me for a ride.
Oh, and just so you know, my factories in the screenshots are such a mess and, uhh, let’s call it “compact”, in order to avoid performance issues. Yeah totally, that’s why. Nooo other reason, I swear! I’m not bad at optimising, maybe YOU are bad at optimising. I think you’re projecting, really. Anyways, moving on.
Gameplay
In Block Factory, you get to build your very own factory! With blocks! Who could have guessed that? The game is all about building and optimising your own little factories. You gather your blocks, stack them, and glue them together, brick by brick, to create the desired figurines.
The game starts you off with a nice tutorial that lasts for the first few levels, explaining the basics of building your factories, your tools, and how to use them. Each level has it’s own map where you can build certain figurines to place in a diorama. The first thing you need to do is to put down a dispenser over a block source, which are kind of just chilling in the ground waiting for you to extract them. The more block sources you cover, the better. Dispensers work faster the more of an extraction area they cover. Clicking on a dispenser will show you how many pieces it digs up per minute.
Next, you will need to build some different machines to get the bricks into the desired shapes. You can cut, slope and even round them to get the perfect fit. Once your pieces are ready, it is time to build! You can stack and glue them together with the aptly named “Stackers” and “Gluers”. Putting your pieces together feels a lot like playing with a certain kind of building brick that will not be named but you can find our content of here. Of course, you’ll also need conveyor belts to move your pieces from one place to another. If they ever overlap, you can just build a teleporter to move them to the other side, which is apparently a totally normal thing in this universe.
Progression and Upgrades
The figurines you are required to build get a lot more complex as you progress. Eventually, your figures and piece stacks get so big that you have to get extra-large machines to stack and glue them together. However, these machines are absolutely massive and even require huge conveyor belts to move things between them.
You can also paint your bricks! There is a handy colour wheel in the top right of your screen to help you mix the right colours. You can get dyes from resource wells or by crushing blocks to extract their colour. To get white and black, you can bleach and burn blocks before you crush them. Later on, you will be able to buy upgrades that let you mix new colours with a block’s existing colour, or to lighten and darken colours without needing to add black or white. You can also use coins to upgrade the speed of your machines and more!
You get coins by delivering a certain number of figurines per minute to meet a set quota. After that, you can try your hand at earning up to three bonus stars per figurine, but on some tougher levels it’s pretty much impossible to get all the stars without taking apart other factories, as there just aren’t enough resources on the map. Luckily, all of that is optional. In order to beat a level, all you have to do is deliver each figurine once. That’s it!
The game has many different worlds and levels to beat, and things get pretty complicated as you progress.
Creative Mode
Block Factory also features a creative mode where you can design your own figurines and dioramas and build a factory to produce them! The game gives you a map with all the resources you need, and you can take it from there. It is even connected to the Steam Workshop, so there is basically an infinite number of levels to play, which adds a ton of replayability and variety!
However, the figurine builder itself is a real pain in my opinion. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be a delete button. Maybe I’m just missing it, but I can not seem to be able to remove pieces after I place them, unless I spam “undo” until they are gone again. It is also kind of hard to see where some of your pieces are going when you are placing them, but it is not that big of a deal really. You get used to it quite fast. There are also stickers to place onto your figurine to add some nice touches, but a lot of them only come in one size, and they clip onto your blocks, which makes it feel really limiting when you are trying to stack them or play around with designs.
Nonetheless, I gave it a shot and tried my best to build the Thumb Culture mascot Paddy. Let me know how you think I did in the comments! If you own the game, you can download his little figurine here to build it yourself.
Graphics & Audio
Block Factory‘s graphics are rather simple, but that is perfect for a game about building bricks if you ask me. The colours are fitting and bright, and the figurines that you have to build are nicely designed. You can really tell that someone spent a lot of time designing them. There isn’t all too much to say about the visuals as they are so basic, but that’s what makes them so charming in my opinion.
However, if you are planning on building a big factory (as the game wants you to if you are trying to get all the 3 Stars), or if you are deleting some conveyor belts, the game gets really very laggy. Like unplayable laggy. For me, it crashed a lot due to this, but I found a workaround by turning off all sounds. It is a bit of a bummer playing the game in silence to get it to run better, but the developers are actively looking for a solution to the performance issues.
Unfortunately, due to this lag, I can not say a whole lot about the game’s audio, as I had it turned off for the majority of my playtime, but I did give it a quick listen in order to provide a brief review. The background music is very calm and relaxing, which is perfect for a chill, casual game like this. The building menu sounds are fun little “beep boops”, and the machines make satisfying clicks and clacks as they build. From what I heard, the audio does a good job of fitting into the feel of the game.
Longevity
The game’s longevity really depends on how much you enjoy its core concept and gameplay loop. While it starts out easy with small builds that only require a handful of pieces, it gets really tricky very fast, which can make things feel a bit tedious, at least for me. There also aren’t many rewards besides coins and progression. Getting three stars on everything doesn’t seem to give you anything extra, and it really takes a lot of work. But if you are into this kind of gameplay and don’t mind the grind, you will get a lot of playtime out of the game, thanks to all the available levels, but especially due to the creative mode.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I’d say that Block Factory is just “okay”. The performance issues right from the start were a huge let-down and having to turn the sounds off also wasn’t great for immersion. I also had to restart some levels because of a bug that prevented me from loading into already started maps, which was pretty frustrating.
The game can feel very tedious at times. In other similar games, it feels more rewarding to progress, but in this one, you’re just handed more complicated things to tackle with pretty much the same equipment once you reach a certain point. To me, the game is neither here nor there, but also not a complete failure. Ultimately, the game does what it promises, and that’s what matters. If you enjoy simple factory builders, or you like to fiddle with building bricks, you may still want to have a go at it, though I’d suggest getting it on sale, and overall waiting a few updates for them to patch out the stability issues.
All that being said, today Block Factory will receive the Thumb Culture Silver Award.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
If you enjoyed this review, why not check out my previous article about Worship’s Early Access.
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