So, you've crash-landed on a hostile planet with nothing but a pickaxe. You want to build a rocket that will get you back into space. So you can start by mining some rocks to build a furnace, mining some coal to fuel it, and baking some copper and iron ore into plates. Then you can use them to craft copper wires and iron gears, which can be used to make circuits and machines and buildings.

Simple enough. Pretty standard crafting system for a resource management game. Now you just need to do it another -

Wait, what? Five billion times? Am I reading this right?

Billion? Are you freaking kidding me?!

You have to be exaggerating. Those are figurative billions, right?

... No? They're literal billions?

... And those are just your basic wires and gears? You need hundreds of millions of everything else, too?

... Oh. Oh dear.

Sounds like we're gonna need to find a better way to get things done.

When I describe Factorio to someone, I like to say "It's a game that plays itself. That's the whole point. But you have to set it up so that it plays itself." I also like to say "It's Stardew Valley if it were made by Zachtronics." Indeed, the theme of this game is automation! It requires you to complete projects of ridiculously large scope and long distances, and it's up to you to get your factory to do it for you as efficiently as possible. There are three objects that make up the bread and butter of this game: magical conveyor belts that always run and don't need any sort of power, assembly machines that can craft things for you provided they have the necessary materials, and robotic arms that can grab and pull items to and from buildings, storage boxes, or conveyor belts. Using these main things, you can design a base that crafts stuff for you, and in very large quantites, which then become crafting components for something else, and so on. Before you know it, your base might become very twisty and complex as you're shipping materials around every which way. It's like a visual programming language!

The tech tree requires you to craft "science packs" and insert them into research labs. Each type of science pack can be assembled with some of the most complex items you can craft at the current stage of the game. For instance, the crafting recipe for an early type of science pack is a robotic arm and a piece of conveyor belt. And that's only for one -- you're going to need thousands of science packs to progress to the next stage of the tech tree. But once you do, you can unlock increasingly useful things that can make your factory even more efficient -- like conveyor belts that run underground and allow you to bridge them across one another, railroad systems that can quickly ship resources miles across the map, or flying robots that can carry items through the air, letting you bypass the conveyor system entirely.

But the biggest mind-blow comes late in the game once you've unlocked the ability to cut, copy, and paste entire configurations of buildings around! And you can also save those configurations to "blueprint" objects for later use, or share them online! So if the first half of the game is about avoiding tedium of repetitive tasks using automation, the second half is all about focusing on efficiency, identifying and fixing bottlenecks in your massive production line, expanding the scope of your goals, and designing the perfect blueprints that can be re-used to quickly set up new sections of your ever-growing base.

There's a reason I compare this game to Stardew Valley. It's addictive. It's damn addictive. Like real programming, there's unmatched joy in designing something complicated that amazingly works, and it just encourages you to push yourself further and build something even bigger! I've been playing this game for 3 weeks and I've already clocked 100+ hours. Just beating the five tutorial levels took me 10 hours. Beweare, this is a real time sink! But at least it's a time sink that's mentally stimulating and might teach you a thing or two about real-world logistic concepts at the same time!

The game has a slew of special modes, and even online multiplayer, but I can't say I've tried them -- as of now I'm still immersed by the vanilla experience. The game also has a huge modding community, but I'm not touching mods either until I finish the achievements. So really, 100 hours is just scratching the surface of what you can do in this game.

But here's my biggest complaint about the game: it's clear that tons of thought went into the tech tree and all the amazing machines you can unlock, but the planet you're stranded on isn't really that interesting. There are only four map biomes: grass, desert, forest, and lake. There are only 4 basic types of ores you use to build everything, and about 8 natural resources total. There are alien bugs, which only come in 3 types, that will periodically attempt to attack your factory, forcing you to research and build military equipment to keep them out. The bugs have some mysterious rules they follow, but once you figure them out, there's nothing else in this game to really explore. There's so much missed potential here for a deep world with more mysterious rules, making it feel like an adventure to explore beyond the boundaries of the known world, rather than a simple workspace that needs decluttering from alien bug nests. The game really needs like 10 more biomes and several more interesting enemy types. (To be fair, there are tons of community mods that add all sorts of new content, if you're into mods.)

My other complaint is that the interface is pretty obtuse and has a weird learning curve. I highly recommend playing the entire 10-hour tutorial to get a hang of things, and make sure you remap your keybinds once you understand how the game works. And to be fair, the game is still in active development as of this writing. It just got out of Early Access, it's still v1.0.0, with a new patch that comes soon that will apparently add some interface improvements, so hope is not lost.

I'll give this a 9 / 10! I still can't believe Zachtronics didn't develop this! It's both creatively and intellectually stimulating in all the ways an engineer should appreciate. I'm deeply enjoying my time with the game and I'll miss it when I move on to something else. I only regret those nights were I swear I'll come to bed as soon as this next research is done, or when this next base is built -- and suddenly it's 6 AM. Yeah, it's that kind of game.

(Achievement hunters: I'm only about 60% complete, and I'm already at 100+ hours. Approach at your own risk. But if this is your kind of game, you'll hardly notice the time passing.)

Evoland 2 is a grand adventure game that has the feel of a JRPG without actually being one. It is a huge step up from the original. If you haven’t played the original Evoland, I recommend not bothering – just skip to this one. It takes all of the half-finished ideas from the original and finishes them, combining them into a huge, story-driven, humor-driven, genre-sampling experience that will leave you feeling like you’ve explored everything that retro gaming had to offer.

The gameplay starts out resembling Zelda’s hack-and-slashing, but it doesn’t stay that way. In fact, I won’t even claim to pin a genre onto this game – it throws everything at you. I wouldn’t dare spoil anything more than that. Half the fun is getting to see what crazy scenario the game serves up next. (And in case you're worried -- gone are the random encounters from the first game! This game has no random encounters at all, with the exception of one particular dungeon...)

Don’t be fooled by the constant barrage of borderline-plagiarism jabs and references to famous games – between them lies a decent, well-told story about time travel, nostalgia, war and politics, and the changing of eras. If you get immersed in the story, you’ll find that it occasionally drops thought-provoking details which keep you guessing and ultimately come together to paint a complete picture of what is really happening throughout history.

As a fair warning, this game has very slow pacing. Expect to spend 30-60 minutes in every new area. Try to get immersed into the story and the world – if you’re the kind of gamer who wants to get things over with as fast as possible, you’ll probably get bored and annoyed with this game very fast.

As another fair warning, due to the genre-sampling nature of this game, you’ll probably encounter one or two areas you’ll absolutely hate. The genre-change areas go on pretty long (30-60 minutes each) but I enjoyed their length – they make the alternate gameplay feel less like minigames and more like valid representations of the various genres, something you’ve got to settle into and get a feel for before you can graduate from them. It’s a game about trying everything, so you’ve got to have a mentality of being willing to man up and complete an area even if you don’t like the gameplay – because what you don’t enjoy at first you might acquire a taste for in the end. (Although, if an area is giving you too much trouble, you’re free to switch the difficulty on the fly anytime you’d like.)

As much as I praise the game, it has its faults. It could have been a 10/10 game, had it not been for a handful of issues:

• Wonky collision detection. You get used to it, but you never really stop noticing it.
  
• The ending is a bit abrupt. You can still get some answers if you read between the lines, but the ending of the story isn’t told nearly as well as the rest of the story.
  
• Various glitches, especially one which can sometimes make objects invisible.
  
• Some weird inconvenient quirks with the interface design (like having to set sail to leave a certain island even after you can fly)
  
• Some jarring plot holes can be created by playing some quests in different (not unintended) orders. For instance, in one scene a character freaks out about there being two copies of a book – even if you already completed a quest where they got a copy made.
  
• In the middle of the game, time travel gets a bit tedious as the only easily-accessible portal is pretty far out of the way, and you have to walk there and back dozens of times.

I give Evoland 2 a 7.5 / 10. It’s a bit rough around the edges and not perfect, but it’s one hell of an adventure! It's very much worth playing for fans of Zelda or retro gaming in general. I loved it; It made me laugh with clever references and fourth wall breaks, it really impressed me with its sense of story development, and it compelled me to keep playing just to see what would come next – just like a good adventure game should. Just make sure to go into the experience with a mentality of patience and expect a 20-hour game, and it might just leave you with warm, fuzzy feelings of nostalgia by the end.

(Achievement hunters: I got about 95% without a guide. The game includes some cool treasure-tracking features that make it much more enjoyable to find all the secrets than in the first game. However, a few secrets are unfairly hidden and don’t show up on the treasure tracker at all, and you might have to resort to a guide to find them at the end. It’s about 20-25 hours to 100%.)