Sometimes I get ahead of myself, wanting to preserve as much of the going-in-blind experience so I don’t build up expectations about the experience. Most of the time it works, but the thing I routinely fail to realise is that can also generate its own set of expectations. Going into Automate It I, wrongfully, assumed it was going to be something like a cutdown Satisfactory, letting me build little factories and expand my empire outwards. It’s not that at all, instead it’s a factory based puzzle solver, giving you a sandbox of tools, resources and required outputs that need to be delivered in a certain timeframe. Once I was over my shock of what I’d gotten myself into I was vibing with the core gameplay loop, even if I can never seem to reach the dizzying heights of the global leaderboard.
The simple premise of “give me enough of X by Y time” belies the complexity of the challenge that you’ll be undertaking. Most of the recipes are relatively straightforward but they’ll require you laying down a level of infrastructure first before you can get everything sorted. Most of the time the naive solutions, I.E. ones that just get everything working, will let you successfully pass the level but will only net you 3 out of the 5 stars that are available for more optimised solutions. Thus begins your descent into madness as you start to figure out where you can optimise the process, move conveyor belts for the 50th time and then wonder how the heck someone else in the world is doing the same thing but wildly faster than you can.
Automate It does a good job of hiding the real complexity of the game by limiting your scope in the early puzzle games, with just a few resource generators, 1 or 2 required outputs and only a handful of logistics tricks. This is also helped by having the recipes down in the bottom right hand corner, meaning it’s rather easy to troubleshoot where you’ve gone wrong when a particular output isn’t working as expected. This can also be misleading at times too because the recipe will always show the full stack for the required output, even when the required inputs aren’t available (I.E. there’s a resource generator that’s providing a finished product, not a base resource for instance).
The real challenge though comes from the optimisation of your chosen solution to get all 5 stars. Some a pretty straightforward: shortening conveyor runs, aligning large buildings in a particular direction, etc. but it doesn’t take long for the top tier 5 star solutions to require some really out of the box thinking in order to accomplish. I mean this literally too as the game won’t tell you about certain features that are actually must haves for certain puzzles like, for instance, the fact that you can build conveyor belts outside the bloody puzzle square, which rapidly turned some solutions from impossible to extremely easy.
Depending on the kind of gamer you are though you might view the gallery, a collection of user submitted pictures showing their solutions, a form of cheating but honestly without that I would’ve been at a total loss in how to figure out some of the game’s more esoteric solutions in order to speed up production. They’re also great at breaking your assumptions, like with the below solution I’d put together. Functionally it’s not that much different from a 5 star variant but 2 changes, (remove the splitter and slightly move the forges) is all that was required to get it there.
There are some quality of life improvements that I think could be made that’d go a long way to reducing fatigue when troubleshooting longer supply chains. Being able to designate a particular building as X type of resource, showing the required resources on the input and the required amount to get full output as well. The game will happily flag the output once all the right inputs are there, and highlight inputs that are below required capacity, but it won’t tell you how much you need to satisfy it. You’ll have to figure that part out yourself. Now I haven’t checked if this is in there but I’d love to be able to save blueprints for certain resources, optimised ones that I could then stamp out as required. Being able to move/reroute full solutions without having to remove it all would also be great.
I could go on but there’s dozens of smaller things like that which, whilst not critical to the core gameplay loop, would’ve kept me around much longer. With the bigger, more complex solutions it just got a bit too tiring having to break large parts of the solution down and rework them again just to optimise one part, which upon completion, would necessitate doing the same thing again somewhere else. Yes, this is a skill issue, that much I’m sure of but there’s a few enhancements here and there I think can be made to make the whole experience just that much more slick.
Automate It isn’t what I expected it to be going in but it was something I found myself enjoying. There’s something satisfying about getting a working solution, iterating on it to improve things and then finally getting a 5 star outcome out of it once you’ve figured out a few tricks to get you there. Using these tricks later on makes those insights all the more satisfying. However the iteration cycles did start to wear on me after a while, especially for the larger, more complex puzzles that took forever to teardown and rebuild. Still for a game that I was wholly unprepared for Automate It is solid game that I’m sure the community will be enjoying for a long time to come.
Rating: 8.0/10
Automate It is available on PC right now for $18.95. Total playtime was3.2 hours with 35% of the achievements unlocked.
