Little Big Workshop Review (Klimpen)
The game was fun as long as your factory was small to medium sized. As I progressed further, the game got more and more furstrating due to the lacking AI and the general lack of control you had of your factory. It is not a fun experience when you have the rescourses available to build something and see both workstations and workers idle for no reason as your money quickly ticks away.
Here are some clear flaws that were exposed/ruined the game once your factory became bigger:
-You cannot assign workers to a specific work station, which leads to that you barely have any control outside of where you store material (which seems bugged). Later in the game, it is all about speed and effectiveness and you cannot maximize how fast your factory works due to lacking worker management, which is the main frustrating thing about this game, you just sit there and watch and hope that the game will move your workers in a way that allows you to keept up (it wont).
-Workers are too ineffective and you cannot do anything about it, you can have one worker move the resource from the storage area, then just leave instead of starting to refine/build and another worker of the same kind will walk from the other side of the factory to start working at the station. Imagine the loss of time when you have +40 workstations and it keeps happeninig to all/almost all of them.. It is the same with building or moving a station.
-Tehcnicans do not really help with workstations maintenance, I hired several technicians and they could just idle around as several workstations broke and I had to sit and click them on my own anyway. The whole maintenance mechanic is boring too, you basically have to sit and watch your stations and click a button to repair them. It is yet another thing that was okay when you had a small factory but became a major chore once you had a larger factory.
-Storing/storage areas seems flawed/bugged; I had a storage area for selling next to one of my loading areas but it was 50/50 wether my workers would use it or not, or just store the finished product at a random location (which could take up important storage area close to work stations). They also NEVER used the larger storage shelves and the smaller shelves were not guaranteed to be used either, which meant that they just took up precious storage space.
-You can assign specific storage areas to specific workstations but since you cannot control your workers they can still put items very far away from workstations even when you have assigned areas. The workers seem to have a preference for general storage areas for some reason, which you cannot do anything about.
-Flawed/Bad UI, you get very little information about your workers and rooms and the economy tab is limited as well.
-There is little to no information in the game about what certain things does, upgrading your workers? Does that mean anything more than that they can handle more advanced stations? The game does not tell you. Room mood, what does it do? The game does not explain it at all, just that it can be positive or negative. I found out quite far into my playthrough that you have to split your bigger resting rooms, as furniture does not help to replenish energy once it has reached level X, the game does not tell you about this either - you need to find it out on your own once your room is too big and you have several items that does not do anything. The game fails to tell you a lot of things in general and there is no way to find out what different things does. I have played for almost 20 hours and still have no idea how some thing work, as there is no way to actually find the information within the game.
-The blueprint idea was interesting and I liked it a lot for most of my time playing this game but in the end I felt like all I did was sit and make blueprints and barely did anything else. Should be quite simple to be able to save how you want to build certain items, even when they are slightly different from the once you already built, it would save a lot of clicking/time on the blueprint screen.
There was a point where the game flipped a switch and became hectic and diffictult very quickly, not because it was complex or had an interesting learning curve but because it did not give you information and the ability to have full control/adapt to how the progressed.