Infinifactory Review
23Developed by Zachtronics, Infinifactory manufactures inventive environment puzzles with quality assurance.
The object of the game is to build a factory using different preset blocks to make the final product. You lay down conveyor belts, welders, sensors, conduits, and about a dozen other things in order to manufacture a certain shape. The objects become more complex, with multiple materials and sources. The difficulty ramps ups nicely through the games 50 levels, including a bonus campaign. You can go back and try to improve your score in one of 3 areas: cycles, footprint, or the amount blocks laid.
The controls on the PS4 are suitable. You wonder around using duelsticks at you would in any FPS, you can hover up and down with the face buttons, and there's a 2 layer wheel you can easily access for the parts. I never got completely comfortable with placing the blocks, which are layed down using R1, rotated with L2, and deleted with R2 but you can swap the buttons in the control options. Just kidding no you can't, please patch the console versions.
The camera angles are good and it's fun to walk around watch you machines goto work. Speeding up and resetting are a mapped to triangle and circle but they could have used a rewind button.
Infinifactory is one of the best brain teasers I've come across in a long time, but don't expect any action or platforming elements. This is an IQ test, pure and simple. Puzzles can be completed in a seemingly infinite amount of ways, and you know when you complete a level that your solution, your factory, is unique. It's extremely satisfying, made even more so that your solution is saved in one of three states, and you can go back and copy and tweak them for optimization. I like the bell curve that shows your performance compared to the rest of the world, but I would have liked leaderboards and superscores even more. My only other complaint is that you have to unlock all of the building blocks by playing through the campaign. This means there's no point of going for low scores until you beat the game, because you won't have the best tools for the optimal solution.
Overall, Infinifactory has produced one of the best puzzlers in the industry and pushes an impeccable amount of replayable content into a tight package. If you like puzzle games pick this up. If you don't like puzzle games, pick this up anyway and score yourself some IQ points, then show off how clever you are to your stupid friends.