Recent reviews by Dredgen Waffle

If you're looking for that something to fill the whole of Titanfall, this is is. Great movement mechanics, fun gunplay, and a dev that's crazy involved with the community. I've spent hours refining routes to get through the levels as fast as possible, doing personal challenge runs, and finding out what each possible Build a Band gun is.

Overall I found Atria to be an enjoyable play through with a couple rough bits here and there. The automation elements are almost there. They aren't bad but there are some elements missing that I feel or common in most other automation games, such as filters and conveyor/character speed upgrades. The story is funny, dark, sad, and hopeful which I was not expecting to get such a wide range of emotions in a game like this. Many of the characters are enjoyable and I found myself actually taking the extra dialog options to learn more about the world. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a complete game. And I don't say that as in the current mechanics and elements aren't enough! More so that you can see there was meant to be more that was either cut or ignored that I would have loved to see fully flushed out here.

First some elements I really liked about the game:

• The story. The employee you play as and heartbox(the machine that you talk to right at the start of the game) have a very charming relationship. Watching the employee mess with this robot and the robot trying its best to keep you on track to connect all the stations is a treat and watching there relationship grow was very enjoyable. I won't say names but each station has a new character you get to meet and each of them I found myself interested in, from heartfelt moments to funny jokes I found myself intrigued by all of them. Overall the story wasn't anything new, but it does incredibly well at conveying an excellent plot with some side stories that made the world feel alive and breathing.
  
• The pod system. This game did an excellent job of adding some fun "power" checks with these tower defense objectives. Each one introduced a new challenge that made sure I had completed a certain set of items in the game otherwise it was incredibly difficult if not down right impossible to complete the pods. I was always excited to see what rare items I would get that I could use to give my base a slight boost and accelerate my research for new upgrades.
  
• The animal machines. I loved them. At first I was terrified, having no way to defend myself from many of the menaces, but after I got my first defense item a whole new world opened up. I had so much fun finding new creatures and trying to figure out how to capture them and then what functionality they could bring to my base. Each one was also unique in that some provided alternative recipes, some allowed for better belt management, and so many other options to mess around with and learn about. Not to mention they are all very cure and I love the designs.

That all being said there were major issues I had with the game:

• The red bulbs, electrics petals, and blood flowers are all gathered by robotic helpers. This wouldn't be too much of an issue if it weren't for the fact that the pathing these robots take to collect items is often very inefficient and results in constant input fluctuation. The red bulbs, for instance, are required to power your base and early on and even with way more robots than I thought necessary I would go from having backed up on the fuel lines to struggling to sustain an input of more than 10 bulbs per minute. In a game where everything else has specific crafting and mining times, this unstable collection of flowers(all of which are needed for powering your base) leads to spending more time and resources on overflowing the power grid rather than progressing with the game.
  
• The hands that I mentioned earlier that I need to make in abundance to overflow my fuel input wouldn't be as a large of a gripe if it weren't for the fact that these hands can only be acquired by completing pod missions. Don't get me wrong, like I said I really enjoyed the pod objectives, but the fact that the item needed to make my fuel input, literally the most important gathering item in the game, is not craftable makes no sense to me. Research bundles, upgraded buffer machines, and storage chests were also locked behind this, but to not rant forever I will only talk about the hands. If the hands were consistent then I could plan my lines around those guaranteed numbers, but with it being inconsistent I should have the option to force so much fuel into my power grid that I can at least guarantee a certain level of power. They try to get around this by adding a buffering machine that only allows a certain amount of items through, but even with this set to a value lower than my expected inputs I would still find myself struggling for consistent input.
  
• Spoiler for a mechanic you don't get until mid game. Lastly, fast travel. It's useless. There is no point in ever using it. If you die, you spawn close by with an active spawn point(not sure why these couldn't be used for fast travel). If you do fast travel it's cause you don't want to travel all the way across the map with your loot, but nope that's now all back where you were. You can work around this by making supply lines between different stations, but if you provide the option of fast travel to only make it this utterly useless why even add it in the first place?
  
• Poor inventory controls. No splitting items stacks or selecting only one. You can't even move items around in your inventory so if you have to small stacks of an items you need to drop one and pick it back up to get the two to merge.

And last, the ugly. I think this game was either rushed at the end of development or cut features weren't properly handled.

• You don't need to defend your base. For only ever really using the defensive towers and walls in pod objectives they give you A LOT of them. Like in the last pod mission they give you some walls which I fully expected would be for when enemies started to attack my base cause I was given hundreds, few of which were needed since I had setup for the pod defense with healing items and stun mines. Not only this but the wall healing tower and the stun tower both are setup to take inputs as if they were to be setup around a base with a ammo feed line moving around it(like in factorio with turrets and bullets). Even in the promotional material you can see defensive lines built around the bases and the character being attacked inside the main area.
  
• Not everything is unlock able. I don't know if I just missed something but at the end of the game I still had like 5 items to unlock, one of which was the gate object that allowed you to have walls that would rise and fall to let you pass. There was also an item called a grav coil? Some pretty cool items that I only got to look at after I beat the game and enables the cheats menu to unlock all of the items. Maybe it's only in the alternative modes of Freeplay or Creative, just feels weird that they are in the Story mode if you can't unlock them ever.

This last thing I just don't like is there is no custom key bindings. I don't know if the rumors hold true that the devs don't plan to add it at all, but custom keybindings is a very common expectation in games nowadays to make them more accessible to a wider audience and aren't difficult to implement unless you've really messed up how you handle player inputs on the backend.

TLDR: 6.5/10. Fun and intriguing story. The elements of automation games it has are almost right with a few unpolished and some common elements found in other games just missing. Inconsistent production rates for certain resources makes progression go from a cakewalk to struggling to meet objective demands. The catchable robot animals make for a great additive. It's exciting to learn how to catch them and how they work for automation. The game doesn't feel done, with certain items locked even after beating the game and some defense items feeling like they aren't needed in abundance but are still given to you making it feel like there should be a larger focus on base defense. Overall, I can't recommend the game in its current state.

This game is so good and has such an incredible dev team behind it that I have purchased all the DLC(which is exclusively cosmetic) just to support them. If you want a great cooperative or solo hoarde fighting, dwarf mining, "Rock and Stone" experience this is it.

So what are you waiting for greenbeard? Get in the drop pod!