Techtonica

I have supported this game with over 400 hours of play time. If I played it so much, you may wonder, why give it a thumbs down? Simple: You have a significant change in the game that was NEVER tested in early access. The change not only altered the play of the game but made several things impossible. Then, add to that the fact that they announced the game is dead right after shoving a drastically changed 1.0 out the door??? Very unprofessional. So in the EA release that we tested, everything was an expansive world and you had to locate the different locations. One of those levels had an elevator that you had to figure out how to repower it to make it usable. Since they were all on one level you could, for example, go to the location called "The Battery", you could rebuild the storage and increase the power and then run wires to other locations. NOW with 1.0 everything is in this vertical orientation and not only that but no way to route power to different levels. You can move products from one level to another but for crying out loud you have to create a power station on EVERY. SINGLE. LEVEL. TO. DO. ANYTHING. If they actually cared about the finished product then they would have sat back and MAYBE??? include a power channel up and down the elevator so you can easily spread power from one location to every level. But they just wanted to toss it out the door and say goodbye. Tonight I found how they threw this out without any care: The assembler has recipes and it defines what products it needs and how much you get out of it. Copper Wire has a recipe for 12 wires however the assembler only gives 10 wires. So they won't ever fix this bug because they have shut down development on the game. And that dropping of the game is why this is the last game I will pay for with this company.

It's dead Jim... So, do not buy. Amazing vibing factory/exploration game but unfortunately abandoned. If you don't mind throwing your money into the aether try it. The bits that are left are still enjoyable but your milage may vary. If the studio had been a bit more open about their struggle the community might have been able to help somehow. Like buying pointless DLCs to finance the thing but now its gone.

Game was fun a few updates ago.. unfortunately they changed it a lot.. what was once a Huge open map is now locked behind a progress elevator literally. it use to not be like this at all. once you'd get out of the beginning area you'd have this huge map that seemed to go one forever. now they cut in to a fraction and made it so you had to use an elevator to get to a new zone. which is just as small.. no way to play that way either which is highly disappointing

Before the game was abandoned, i would have recommended it. But now, knowing it will most likely never get any new content, updates of bugfixes, i would recommend you only ever buy this when its for less than 5 euro/dollar. Dont spend big on this abandonware-project.

My feelings about techtonica were fairly mixed. I originally bought the game mid early-access and decided to hold off on playing it until it was complete. Then I avoided playing it for some time after it 'released' as others were calling it abandonware. It's steam ratings also became quite.. mixed.. which was not encouraging. Finally I decided to play it in June 2025. My feelings about the game seemed to change in phases and I'll let my review take that format as well. Early Game: ________ I was immediately enamoured with the bioluminescent cave environment and focused on exploration. I had fun doing this and discovered some secret areas. The factory game mechanics seemed pretty standard and I didn't see anything that would deserve all the criticism it got on steam (YET). Overall I really enjoyed the early game, building production lines, and exploring the environment. I thought that there was a lot of attention to detail that went into certain things, and I loved how many easter eggs and dialogue snippets there were, for example how sparks pokes fun at you for exploring instead of doing the 'tutorial', multiple times based on what section of the first floor you are exploring. There was an air of mystery as I found corrupted audio logs that hinted at something weird going on story-wise. Mid Game: ________ Mid game is where the cracks started to appear. There would be large spikes in difficulty and the game got caught up in it's own plot to the detriment of it's gameplay. You are tasked with exploring one ruin after another, constantly crafting and fetching items to unlock doors, backtracking a lot and struggling with power generation. Early on you had to make a lot of fuel, then suddenly it's much less useful and you drop it in favour of very power hungry electric machines and drills. I still enjoyed many aspects but things slowly started to get tedious. Mid-Late Game: ________ Going into mid-late game is where the gameplay started to fall apart at the seams. Unlocking research tiers, then finding items, and making cores becomes a tedious process. Suddenly the production pipeline becomes a massive mess; If you were to put it on a node graph it would look like a hopelessly tangled pile of spaghetti with redundant or looping pathways. The game just dumps too much on you in a very tedious way while also trying to push the plot in a very linear and forced fashion. Characters become too serious and the lightheartedness is gone. Unlocking tech turns into too much of a scavenger hunt. You are forced to endlessly backtrack. All your factories suddenly become obsolete, needing to be rebuilt, but resources to do so are scarce. You also need to expand your factories, but build space is limited in these caves and the process of excavating cave walls is slow and tedious. You are managing several dozen item types both in terms of production and inventory management. The UI starts to get in the way as there are too many items and interacting with your hud becomes more cumbersome. In short, end game becomes a tedious mess and the sense of wonder is gone, I don't even want to explore anymore because it's just yet another boring pile of ruined blocks with hidden story items somewhere. There will soon be another spike in production difficulty curve, more factories needing overhaul, etc, etc, because.. Then you get to the desert levels.. The game tells you that you need to research and build many 'sand pumps' to remove all the sand from these floors.. Also your power network is cut off for some reason and you need to start a new one from scratch, go back to hand cranks?... No, Just No! Conclusion: ________ Mixed feelings. The game started off with a lot of promise and it really had something special going, but it looks like somewhere along the way it suffered from a severe case of scope creep and went downhill. You can really see the care and vision that was put into it at the beginning, but somewhere along the way the devs started blindly adding more and more content regardless of whether it was fun or not. Bugs, a lack of polish, and poor usability/QOL is the final nail in the coffin. The end result is that late game is all the worst parts of the factory game genre, all the overwhelming tedium and gradual loss of motivation without the sense of accomplishment. You did all this factory building? Great! None of it mattered! Now redo the whole thing again just because. It feels less like player agency and more like an ever expanding list of chores.. If you have not already made the mistake of buying into early access, I can't recommend getting the game in it's current (and probably final) state. If like me you already have it and haven't played though, well, there's some fun to be had in early game, but I recommend quitting once the cracks start to show in order to end on a positive note. I quite liked the soundtrack though.

TL:DR Unfinished game. The game ran out of funds. Sure, I have 110 hours but that is 110 hours enjoying the first half of this game when ti first came out. Afterwards, it went straight down hill. Laser tag. LASER TAG!? Wtf. I'm over here assuming they have so much money laying around to add a nonsensical minigame into a factory game. And then a few months later, after their customers told them how ridiculous it was to have laser tag in the game, they got mad and took the ball home with them. IE, rushing the last bits of the game and quitting. I just reached the part where you can tell they just gave up. Empty pointless task to prolong the game. I wanted to do a review so I decided to come back and finish it. After doing so, I can understand the frustration of the other negative reviews before me. I don't know what was up with the Devs in thinking that LASER TAG was such a great way to spend their limited funds on....

I am torn about this game: [list] [*] The studio that developed it got closed. [*] Multiplayer is allegedly unplayable (I didn't try). [*] But my singleplayer experience has been great. [*] But only until endgame (~120h) when the game becomes unplayable due to low FPS. [/list] Until you hit the end game and realise how poorly optimised the game is, I have to say that it is very well polished. Very few and very minor bugs that most people probably won't even notice. A lot of nice Quality-of-Life features. The game kind of feels like [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870]Satisfactory[/url] and [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/548430]Deep Rock Galactic[/url], because of the 3D map. Fully modifiable terrain. The game is split into 16 levels, connected by a big lift, which on every level has 30 configurable input/output slots to move items between levels. Even though there are teleporters in the game, I never used them, as I build my factory close to the lift, each level specialising in something else. There are a lot of crafting recipes, I frequently get lost what is available and in which production building. Fandom wiki is poorly maintained with a lot of incorrect information. The world is quite nice, but becomes repetitive. I enjoyed exploring various collapsed constructions made from blocks available to the player, but placed not-aligned to the grid. Picking all of these blocks is a bit annoying, as you have to scan each of them for 1s, rather than mass collecting. I like the end-game sand mechanics (infinitely falling sand that you have to keep pumping out), however it feels like artificially and unnecessarily prolonging the game. Also, the final levels do not share the power with the earlier levels, and there is no water for easy power production. You cannot build a small factory and leave it running overnight, you have to build really huge factory, that produces a lot of fuel, so you can have 30 huge pumps pumping out all the infinitely falling sand... And to it the aforementioned poor optimisation which makes the game unplayable, and [b]I think the last two Steam achievements are beyond reach[/b]. [h1]Great QoL features[/h1] [list] [*] No inventory limit. Items never drop on the ground when you deconstruct something. In worst case you will get encumbrance and reduced moving speed. [*] When mining and holding the LMB, the height does not change, guaranteeing the area to be flat. [*] Various highlighting when placing conveyor belts - makes aligning them very easy. [*] Mining drills have extendable arm, which keeps collecting further cubes once the first layer is mined. Drastically reduces amount of micromanagement needed. [*] A tool to change buildings in place to their different version. [*] Conveyor belts can be rotated without picking them up, and this even includes lifts - both in which direction they are transporting, and in which direction the input/output face. [*] Storage chests have a flexible limit - they can be configured to have as little as 1 cell in the inventory grid. [*] A lot of toolbelts with easy access to items that you use frequently. 10 in total, with 2 of them visible. [*] You can copy an object with a single click - no need to have it on the toolbelt. [*] When you open a crafting machine, the ingredients in your inventory get highlighted. [/list] [h1]Bad UX[/h1] [list] [*] Huge technology tree does not have any search option. [*] Monorail station has very large storage, that cannot be limited (like the storage chests). This makes it unusable for mining operations that require fuel, as both sender and recipient station will collect huge amounts of fuel. [*] Blast Smelter and Blast Drill use explosive charges as fuel, and they always use them all, no matter how many are loaded. It makes it super annoying to configure as you have to limit the input, while also making sure that output is always collected. Otherwise it leads to great waste. [*] Some kind of blueprinting option (copying an area) would be really great. I don't need a blueprint library to save things, but when chaining machines with multiple inputs and outputs, placing all the conveyor belts and inserters manually 1 by 1 gets a bit boring. [*] When using a jetpack, when you get close to any object (wall or ceiling), the jetpack turns off. [*] Highlighting of ingredients when looking into machine's inventory doesn't work for Crusher. [*] There is no way to delete unwanted items. Only some can be run through a cycle of machines to finally smelt them to ash - smelter allows smelting ash to produce less ash than inserted. Dealing with the 3 production outputs when you only need one of them gets really annoying, as the only viable solution is placing a lot of storage chests (and connecting them with inserters and conveyor belts). [/list] [h1]Bugs[/h1] [list] [*] Controls that are used to switch toolbelts when out of inventory do something else while in the inventory. You will quite often end up changing items on your toolbelt, rather than switching to another toolbelt. [*] Count of new things doesn't disappear from journal/crafting. [*] Omni Directional Seeker tool shows a signal of chests that have been collected, and even deconstructed. [*] When opening the big lift's storage, the user's inventory is sometimes locked. Requires closing and reopening the storage. [*] When mining manually (to make space) the highlighter does not always use the right symbols. [*] It happened to me about 2-3 times that conveyor belt became unresponsive to interactions - I couldn't rotate it, change it's type or delete it. However, deleting the area 3x1, with the faulty conveyor in the middle, successfully deletes it. It's possible that reloading the game fixes it, but I didn't try. [/list]

I loved this game in early access, but it isnt the same. Rug pull? Is this legal? WTF

I so very much wanted to like this game after enjoying Satisfactory. I did like it initially. BUT THE TEDIUM GOT ME! Every. single. thing. must. be. built. by. manual. placement. The only semi automatic placement is structural elements and your tech tree items. WHY!? the building was tedious. the expansion was tedious. (drilling never really felt good, and was all but mandatorially manual.) the new tech was tedious. (welp! gotta rebuild my tedious factory now to allow for the different tech options!) Besides the incredibly tedious gameplay, the difficulty made very little sense. There is a difficulty jump in the mid-late game that EVERYONE hates. and it makes no sense. Put that at the end as a type of climactic conclusion to your otherwise smooth progression and challenge curve! The devs messed up with that. It feels like they knew their ending was bad so they added a mountainous climb before the actual ending so you wouldn't GET to the actual ending. The artwork/animation was good. The sounds/music was good. The characters were good (not an easy accomplishment with an automation game). But the glaring issues with the tedium element not being addressed and the difficulty arc made it so I couldn't even finish it. I got to the soft ending, saw the mountainous final ending and quit. I have better games to spend my time on.

A very unfortunate ending to a game that could have become one of the best factory games out there. On a level headed approach- If you're not part of the party that followed this game during early-access, you may still enjoy it. It does what it needs to for a factory game, though I would wait for a discount if it ever happens. Many other factory games are on the cusp of releasing, and are worth more than spending $30 here. If you care to know what happened beyond that, the other reviews here cover it pretty thoroughly. The most I'll say is that the game was fumbled on its update before release, and then was completely stripped down in order to function on consoles before shoving it out to v1.0 as a last ditch effort. Lets just say that the whole event created a history book page on what NOT to do when developing a factory game. If you're still tempted beyond even that, there is access to the pre-v1.0 versions. Those versions are very worthwhile to play and there is PLENTY to do, if you look past the fact that progression will come to an abrupt halt. Cheers o7

While there are some minor flaws within this game, Tectonica can be a lot of fun to play, at least in the beginning. The main reason I'm giving this game a negative review is due to the poor performance when you've reached the final 3 floors. You can generally expect to get less than 20fps fairly consistently on beefy PC with a moderately large factory. This game just isn't well optimised for the huge amount of resources you need to process at the same time. Furthermore, the mouse sensitivity is tied to the games performance. This results in having to change your mouse sensitivity when moving between different floors due to one floor running at 120fps while another floor runs 40fps. Essentially the difference in performance causes sensitivity to double or halve when alternating between levels. Sadly Tectonica is no longer receiving any future patches due to the developers running out of money. Based on it's current state I can not recommend this game.

Game abandoned after 1.0 release with no update from dev team (even tho the update notes talk about more updates). First half of game is good, later stages not so much and the multiplayer gets REALLY bad and buggy on the second half of the game

Development could have slowed, but instead they just gave up completely. Some goober decided that laser tag was a good idea in a factory game. Must have never heard the term "scope creep" before. Probably would've been better to target niche audiences like that _after_ you've finished creating a game with broader appeal to your main audience or better yet, just allow modders to handle it. This was a game I was really excited for and jumped into EA early only to watch it fall apart after they wasted time on bad changes and before they implemented the parts of the game I was most excited about. The market's still open for an open-world factory game with smooth terrain manipulation and a solid focus on exploration and story telling with some depth to it. Too bad this ruined the Early Access experience for so many players.

The game has an interesting story and a fully voiced dialog which was a positive surprise for a factory game. However, the game also has many issues. There is a certain machine that will tank you FPS if you build too many of them. Many recipes don't make any sense. Some mechanics are not explained. Technology becomes deprecated too quickly so it doesn't pay off to scale up the production until the end game. In spite of these issues, I enjoyed the game a lot.

Underrated game! I finished the beta version and had a great time (on my second Steam account). Pros: immersion, beautiful graphics, interesting mechanics—like the single-track railway, or rather, a cute little train 😊 The game has a lower rating than it deserves. This is due to the developer facing issues and the uncertain future of the game. But is that really a reason to rate it negatively? Alongside Satisfactory, Eden Crafters, and Foundry, this is one of my favorite games. Thumbs up from me—now onto version 1.0!

Half baked, company has shuttered, only people getting paid from your purchase are whoever owns their debts.

Excellent factory builder game with much customization, gets challenging during mid-game, i still haven't made it to the endgame levels of the freight elevator, there are 17 floors and I've reached ten in my 60 hours of 1.0 World, during alpha was a blast but its not important.

Nice pump & dump @ Fire Horse Do not buy, dead game

I Swear I'm Gonna Launch All This Stupid Sand Into The Deep Reaches of Space And All of The Universe! The Sesamite! Get it Away From Me!! The Sand Was Always Cursed! Always!

Want a game to get lost in and to pass the time this game is for you

Couldn't refund, wish I could have

If you like math, this is a great game.

It does what it says it does...

take it off or heavily discount it.

Tired of abandoned games.

Abandoned and mediocre

this game is cool

no

:c

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