izigame.me

Cute design and great concept, but the worker management feels buggy, or it's just terrible designed, ruins the game and constantly gets in the way of making your factory efficient or profitable. It only gets worse because none of it is explained properly (if at all). Overall I like the game, but it has way too many stupid and poorly implemented mechanics that don't belong in a game that should be about production line optimization. And there's no way to tune the difficulty of these to make the game enjoyable.
I really like how products have to be planned and that you have the freedom to split up the factory into different production lines, and it's nice that it saves your setup so you can repeat products without having to reconfigure the plan. But everything else is not designed to the same quality.
If you're into product line optimization, this is not the game for you. The game is entirely about trying to keep your workers working instead of taking breaks. Even when you give them better equipment they just complain more, and there's a severe lack of conveyors and automation.

Annoyances:
- You can lay out your factory however you want, but the workers hate large rooms, and you need large rooms to fit all the machines required for a complete production line.
- Workers hate the machines you need to produce stuff, so you have to fill the rooms with decorations, which wastes space and means you need bigger rooms, which the workers hate.
- Workers' energy level is relative to the room's mood (which the game doesn't mention) and even with a high mood they will always sit on their ass and drink coffee all day long. If a room is +25 mood they'll work for all of 30 seconds between taking breaks, which means all tasks take forever to get done, almost like the mood decorations don't work at all, or at least not the way you'd expect.
- Break room mechanics are not explained at all and the room "lenses" do not help as there's no explanation for what any of the icons mean. But since they won't do any work between breaks anyway, it doesn't really matter either way since there's no way to keep them out of the break room.
- Very early on the game tells you about worker specialization, long before you're able to unlock and use it. But the specialization is a trap and will destroy the company if you use it when it becomes available - the specialists cost more and are less tolerant, and will do even less work between breaks.
- You need more advanced machines to take on the bigger contracts, but the workers hate the machines more the more advanced they are, and then you're in the circle of hell of trying to fit 3 billion decorations into a room just to run 1 machine. This is entirely backwards: A bigger more efficient machine should be more enjoyable to use and tire the workers slower, not the other way around.
The really bad mechanics:
- Completing contracts on time (especially the ones with a short time limit) is difficult, bordering on near impossible early on, because the workers sit around and refuse to work. And even when you pick up three identical contracts and fail to fully deliver one, you can't use the leftover items to complete the next contract.
- If you drop a contract or work order, all the delivered resources are automatically thrown in the trash instead of being kept in storage. That makes no sense and no factory/workshop operates like that.
- Items produced for contracts can't be sold on the open market or any other way, so any product you get leftover because it's not finished on time can only be sold as scrap, which again makes no sense. So if you fail to complete an order you not only do not get paid (which is fair), but you also lose all the money you spent on buying materials. Basically taking on the time limited contracts (or challenges as the game calls them) is a terrible idea unless you have a fully built up factory, because it takes the dudes so long to do everything.
- Once your economy goes south and you're in debt there's no real way to recover. Sure you can start selling off the machines and decorations, and fire people, but that just handicaps your ability to produce anything. There are no loans and you can't do anything when you're in debt, which means you can't even make any products to get back in positive. And if you hit -5000 (which is very little compared to the prices in this game) it's game over.
The problematic:
- The game flickers everytime it autosaves, and there's no way to adjust the autosave, and it never tells you that it's saving, you just have to hope it does.
- After a few hours of playing the graphics crap out and the game becomes unplayable, and has to be reloaded.
- The in-game help doesn't explain very much at all and there's a lot of icons through all of the UI that don't have any help or tooltip whatsoever.