Recent reviews by Cynimatic

take the horse pill

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SUCKS

sucks

Battle of the pings

One of those games I wish I could forget everything about. I want to experience this game from when I knew nothing about it all over again. A true mind bender of a puzzle game that you have to play.

good

Why this game stopped being good:
-Lowered base health
-Stupid regenerating base shield that does nothing
-Can now only destroy bases with melee weapon
-Removal of old, good maps and replaced with new ♥♥♥♥♥♥ maps
-New idiotic OP characters
-Brains (DEFENCE) role heros no longer being able to place radars
-Turret health and damage significantly lowered, basically rendering them useless
-Servers are practically empty and what few people there are have no idea what they're doing
-Absolutely no co-operation within teams

I had a lot of fun playing Block N load with friends, but I cannot recommend it because it's just gotten boring and frustrating.

Now that I've completed the campaign of Infinifactory, I think it's time to get my full thoughts and feelings down about it.

Gameplay wise there's nothing wrong at all. You're tasked with building factories that must move, weld, rotate, lift, and destroy input blocks to match an output, and it must do this 10 times. The puzzles are all fun and challenging to solve, with a great learning curve as you progress. Each new set of puzzles adds a new block or game mechanic for you to work with, and so the game is kept interesting and fresh, and the feeling you get after completing a puzzle you've been stuck on is euphoric. The game also grades how well you did after you complete a puzzle against other players, making you want to improve your solution until you're better than everyone else.

The design of this game is fantastic and each setting for the puzzles manages to pull off a terrific atmosphere of loneliness and isolation. The factory blocks you build with are all very nicely designed, as are the input and output blocks. If I had one complaint about the design, it would be the information boards occasionally put in the puzzles to help you with how to use a new block (like in the 4th screen shot). Sometimes there's "human" symbols on them, such as a "?" or "3x". I mention this because your abductors clearly have no interest in learning your language, so why would they use symbols that you'd understand? I also want to mention that I love the soundtrack in this game.

The story. Hmm. Well, as I mentioned, you have been abducted by aliens, and they are enslaving you and putting you to work building factories that make useful things for them, and I really like it. Much like Portal, the story is more like a framework to give an excuse to solve puzzles, and not the other way around, and it works really well. The story is told simply. You meet your abductors at the beginning of the the game, and then at the end of each set of puzzles to recieve a reward from them, and each time they garble opressive sounding nonsense at you and then send you to your cell. The story is also told through failure logs on corpses you find scattered throughout the levels, and gradually this builds up the bigger picture of your overlords. The tone of this game reminds me most of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: funny but with an looming sense of tragedy. The humour is very subtle, and I love it. BUT...

[Spoilers after this point, scroll to the bottom if you want my conclusion] (I would do the black out text thing but I have no idea how)

This is ALL ruined when you get saved. Yes... I know... Being rescued is just the worst isn't it?
After the last set of puzzles you're put infront of the overlords, and they present you with a reward as usual, but this time it's a bomb that a resistance group planted, and you are saved by them and put to work building ship parts etc.. needed for them to rescue more and then eventually go home. The puzzle quality doesn't drop, but the atmosphere and humour certainly does. That atmosphere of complete loneliness and isloation and opression that was created by the overlords is totally destroyed. The dead corpses and failure logs are gone, and are replaced by recordings from the resistance leaders, almost all of which I hate. The only tolerable character for me is Ortis, and you don't even meet him. The dark underlying humour is replaced with generic banter between the leaders and "I'm so glad that you didn't die from that explosion when we saved you" jokes. It's so difficult to say this but I hate the second half of the story. If you'd stayed under the opression of the overlords, but kept the same puzzles from the resistace campaign, you'd have a perfect game in my opinion. Maybe it could've been that the resistance did start to attack, and the overlords started forcing you to build things that would destroy the resistance trying to save you.

Maybe the story bothers me a bit more than others, but it still remains that it annoys me.
Regardless of this, I still highly recommend this game for the gameplay. It's a fun, challenging puzzle game and I guess that's all it really needed to be.