Industrial Review

Industrial was released on September 30. The trailer of first-person shooter impressed with its pleasant visuals, original design and unusual setting with robots and post-apocalypse. Today it's time to review game.

Oct 15, 2021 - 16:35
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Industrial Review
Industrial review. If only Half-Life 3 was also similar to this computer video game.

The authors were clearly inspired by such computer games as: Half-Life 2, SOMA, Control and the expected Atomic Heart. But should you spend your precious time on Industrial? Let's explain now!

What is Industrial?

Imagine that you are an ordinary programmer who languishes at a boring job from morning to evening and dreams of creating your own game. You have no free time, no budget — just a passionate desire and five comrades who are ready to get involved in an adventure and realize what you have planned from the beginning to the moment of release of the goods.

What kind of project would you undertake in an environment where there are no resources, few hands, and you can only develop in the evenings and on weekends? For an open-world RPG? For action with special effects and staging?

No, it's all too ambitious. Most creators immediately take aim at something grandiose and eventually either burn down in the process, or release dubious trash.

A game like Industria seems like the perfect choice. It is linear, takes four hours to complete and stands out from other novelties. There are enough problems in it, but if desired, they can be corrected with a couple of patches.

Industria is a great attempt to try their hand, after evaluating which publishers can allocate a considerable budget to Bleakmill studios and send them to develop something larger. But should gamers buy the game? But this is already a difficult question.

The plot of game: Industrial

November 9, 1989. On this day, the world changed a lot, because de juarez the Berlin Wall cease to exist. People poured in droves from the eastern part of Berlin to the western, and a year later the wall was completely destroyed — the GDR at that time became part of the FRG.

The events of Industria unfold against the background of the fall of the wall — that's just the heroes are focused on other problems. Nora and Walter work for the Atlas organization: there they study a mysterious machine for which space and time are not an obstacle.

On an important day for the whole of Germany, Nora receives a call from a colleague and a loved one. Walter says that the car is behaving strangely, and he himself must stop the Atlas. The heroine runs to work and finds out that her lover jumped into a powerful device and disappeared. Following him, she enters another dimension.

It soon turns out that Nora was 20 years late — that's how much time has passed since Walter's arrival in the strange world. Reality itself is also not all right: sinister mechanisms are scattered everywhere, aggressive robots are running around the streets, and only one old man is alive in the whole city. What's going on here? Where did Walter go? How to survive in a place that was captured by pieces of iron?

To catch up with more fog, the levels are accompanied by strange gameplay inserts in which a mysterious character explores the library and watches creepy theatrical performances. In all this devilry, you have to figure it out.

The tie of Industria turned out to be curious. "Atlas" resembles the "Federal Bureau of Control" from Control, the new world is beautiful and unusual, the riddles are intriguing. Alas, as you progress, it becomes clear that the screenwriter lacked the skill to skillfully tie all the knots together.

The ending turned out... strange. In the final, gamers are waiting for a not particularly talented twist that asks new questions, but does not answer the old ones. To figure out what happened in the Industria world, you will have to feel like an avid conspiracy theorist.

Besides, the world itself is not really disclosed. Another reality is full of wars, hopes and tragedies, but little is said about it. Occasionally, the only interlocutor talks about important events on the radio, and a modest number of documents slightly opens the veil of secrecy. Industria is one of those games in which I would like to read notes, but there are too few of them.devilry and you have to figure it out.

It is worth noting that a team of six people managed to find resources for localization — let me remind you that Microsoft and the authors of the gorgeous Psychonauts 2 did not have enough for this. Philologists are shocked by the abundance of errors in the translation, but gamers who do not know the language of Shakespeare will be happy about this. In the end, you can close your eyes to words like "in a hurry" and "feeling".

Industrial Gameplay

Industria is a first-person adventure that periodically turns into a shooter. Nora wanders the world, explores locations, solves rare puzzles and fights with robots. Some mechanics are a bit crooked, but, in general, they do not interfere with enjoying the game.

The fact is that the authors bet on the atmosphere. The mood of the project is somewhat reminiscent of the delightful SOMA: the world is saturated with universal sadness, which envelops the gamer and makes him feel the tragedy of this reality. Humanity, it would seem, has no chance to escape, but the heroes still cling to the mystical hope.

Another advantage of Industria is an inventive level design. In the starting location, you feel like a Control hero: in the Atlas building, a lot of strange objects like a kettle, a suitcase and a hefty fish are being monitored — they resemble the very duck from the "Federal Bureau of Control". The architecture of the city itself looks like City-17 from Half-Life 2.

There are enough such borrowings, but their combination creates something new and curious.

However, there are also enough oddities in the level design. For example, a Burrow can wander into rooms where there is nothing interesting at all. Often developers leave at least cartridges and hilki in dead-end places, but sometimes they forget even about these little things.

You go into a bar, look at the tables and chairs, don't find anything interesting and go out. There is a feeling that the developers simply did not have time to fill the place with at least something useful. This is not uncommon.

You also have to solve simple puzzles from time to time. In Industrial, as in Half-Life 2, you can pick up many items like mugs, boxes and flasks, and then drag them somewhere. It is on such physics that most of the tasks are tied: you need to arrange things in the right order, build platforms or rake obstacles.

The riddles are elementary, but sometimes they still put you in a stupor. For example, at the beginning of the game you need to power the elevator with electricity — the energy here is generated by a hefty furnace. I circled around her for a long time until I remembered that I had put matches in my pocket a long time ago.

The fact is that there are often no interactive buttons in Industria, and it is not always possible to guess when and where to use a thing from the inventory.

The rest of the time, Nora will fight robots. At first, she has only an axe in her arsenal, but over time the heroine will find a pistol, a machine gun, a shotgun and a sniper rifle. Alas, the shooting in Industria is mediocre: the recoil is implemented so-so, the guns sound bad, it's inconvenient to aim.

In addition, there are few types of enemies, and they rarely challenge. On the way there will be two types of robots-melishnikov, kamikaze bots, shooters and mechanical dogs. During the whole game, there are only a couple of moments when the mechs pile up in droves and make you sweat — in other cases, it's easy to scatter them.

The gameplay of Industria turned out to be simple, but it's enough to hold attention until the finale. Fortunately, even if you explore every nook and cranny, the game is played in four hours. Riddles, battles, horror episodes, mysterious scenes in the library - these puzzles make up a good picture.

Alas, there are problems in Industria, because of which it cannot be recommended even to the most ardent indie fans.

Graphics, optimization and bugs

Industria looks nice. It's not worth considering textures up close, but if you look at the terrain from the side, the visual can impress. Elaborate architecture, stylish design of locations, a suitable lighting and reflection system - it feels like the developers have given their best.

But the optimization failed. FPS regularly subsides for no reason, but these are trifles compared to the nightmare closer to the end of the game.

At the penultimate level, the shadows are completely broken. It seems that the game is trying to calculate shadows for all objects on the location at once - even for those that are out of sight. Because of this, Industria turns into a slideshow even on the GTX 1070.

If you reduce the quality of shadows to a minimum, and leave all other settings to the maximum, the problem will be solved. It is interesting that neither before nor after such a situation is repeated.

Bugs are also full. The heroine can walk through textures. If you minimize the game and turn it back on, artifacts will appear on the screen. After loading, Nora may lose her weapon — so I once lost an axe and passed Industria without it.

These bugs can be survived, but others can break the passage. You need to stay in the game with typewriters — a kind of reference to Resident Evil. The trouble is that one day the download sent the heroine not back to the device, but somewhere behind the textures. At the same time, no matter how many times I rebooted, Nora continued to spawn behind the map.

I passed Industria on normal difficulty, which provides for autosave. As a result, I just went to the last checkpoint and lost 20 minutes of progress. However, at high difficulty, it is possible to save only from typewriters — in this case, you would have to go through the game first.

The developers should have postponed the release and carried out additional polishing of the game. Alas, they were either in a hurry or just tired of working on Industria — after all, the development lasted four years.

Industria is a good debut project, which hints that Bleakmill can allocate a decent budget and wait for a good result. If you have been looking for a project in the spirit of Half-Life for a long time, pay attention to Industria. The game turned out to be budget and arthouse, but she can give emotions similar to the adventure in City 17.

By the way, do you think Half-Life 3 will ever be released or should we forget about the sequel? Write in the comments!

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