Performance got a lot spottier at the end of the game, though. I would sometimes get 30 fps, but it mostly hovered around 60 with occasional dips to 40, on a 5700 XT. Performance, on the other hand, isn’t great. The level design is clear, the areas are believable, and the assets work fine. It’s far from an amazing game visually, but it’s pretty good for mostly being made by two people. I was fairly impressed by Industria‘s visuals. Although, normal mode has autosaves, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.
In the aforementioned bugged manual save, loading this level would see me load into an area with a whole load of the dog enemies and no way to escape. There’s also a dog robot that shows up in a single section of the game. Another type shoots you with machine guns, while another melee type hits you with a stun baton. Then there’s a little bot that chases after you and then explodes. The default enemy is purely melee-based and just swings at you. The shooting is fairly enjoyable and the enemies are variable, so combat works as a hook here. All of these have a fairly limited ammo capacity, save for the shotgun, which lets you carry over 100 shells. Nora gets a pistol, submachine gun, bolt action rifle, and shotgun. At one point you do have to disconnect two devices to move forward, but other than that, this is a purely linear, story-focused shoot ’em up. Once you get a gun, though, you pretty much never have to do any more adventure game shit. Well, they’re not complicated enough to actually be called puzzles, so I guess I’ll just call it “adventure game shit.”
The early part of the game focuses on puzzles since you don’t have guns yet. They also start running away when they’re severely damaged, so you can run after them and hit them in the back with the pickax. The charged swing is more than enough to comfortably take out the game’s most common enemy type, so I liked using that. Your initial weapon is a pickax that has a default and charged swing. Thank you.Įarly on, Industria has survival horror vibes. Unless it’s melodic hardcore, because who doesn’t love the oozin’ ahs? That’s a punk rock joke. I had at least one manual save become unusable, so I don’t recommend playing hardcore right now. Hardcore is, obviously, more difficult and provides less ammo, with manual saves only. You can choose to play it on normal or hardcore modes. Industria takes about four hours to finish, but only has five enemy types for you to face, so it doesn’t wear out its welcome. It also takes all of its twists and turns from the BioShock playbook.
No humans remain, save for one, and robots patrol the streets. After finding the exit, she wakes up years in the future where ATLAS has destroyed the country.
Upon retracing their steps, she ends up getting sucked into some sort of temporal anomaly before waking up in a library. There’s an AI hivemind called ATLAS and something weird is going on, so Nora heads to the company building to track Walter down and get to the bottom of this. Industria drops you into the shoes of Nora, a woman in the mid-20th century who gets a surprising phone call from her boyfriend, Walter. Where else can you hit bots with a pickax? It lacks polish and ends on a pretty jarring cliffhanger, but I had a good time fighting my way through robots in this game. Although it was mainly put together by a couple of people, it’s actually really solid. This time, it’s a short-ish first-person shooter with a strong focus on story, along with some puzzle elements. Robots sure have a lot of uprisings in fiction, don’t they? Industria is the latest game to have players get near automatons.