Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure Steam Charts & Stats

This is a refreshing take on the automation genre. I in particular like that each zone comes with its own challenges rather than just more and more automation. I find the different sparks quite imaginative in gameplay application, and while some are an upgrade of the other, none of the them feel like they're losing their purpose. The quest system is quite novel for these type of games and it's a little different from the usual 'make 1000 antbutts before advancing to the next stage' All in all I quite enjoyed it!

Really unique take on the factory game genre with the sparks. Very comfy, very cosy, plays well on controller (including the buildings bits), the sparks make cute noises as you chuck 'em and so do the npcs (you don't throw them), especially the Divine Researcher who's extra goofy. It runs hot but no obvious performance issues, very smooth. Plenty of complex production lines feeding into each other to keep you busy and a train system for transport I didn't expect such depth from. It's been a pleasure following along with the development journey in early access.

pretty simple, laidback automation game. not too many products, and progression basically revolves around make enough X to show you automated it, unlocking Y. Repeat. Just the gimmick of the game is that your conveyor belts are minions/pikmin. Unfortunately the pikmin-y part is downplayed to the point of nonexistence, mostly just simple combat.

I feared it would be quite basic automation gaame, buut there are more tools than I hoped there would be! And it's super cute!

A really charming and fun fusion of Factorio and Pikmin that gladly wears its inspirations on its sleeves. I think if you're approaching this game as a 1-to-1 to other factory builders, you're going to be disappointed; it's difficult-to-impossible to achieve 100% efficiency due to your factory lines being manned by creatures that need to go from point A to point B to transport materials, rather than conveyor lines. If you're cool with taking it casually and operating more on "vibes-based" factory building, though, I think Oddsparks will appeal to you a lot.

Reviews about aether farming seem to be patched out. Really enjoying the game so far and I have not had to grind materials at all

Once I got passed the initial learning phase this game really hooked me. Would recommend for any automation game fan. It also has lil guys! (The most important part)

It's a cozy and good-looking game with lots of flair and charm to it. However, if you are like me, looking for a game to play with efficiency and good layout, you will find this game to be disappointing and quite frustrating at times because of the inherent limitations in the mechanics as I will list them below: - Rather than conveyor belts, the game instead uses Sparks (Pikmin-esque creatures) as the main mode of logistics and moving things around. Additionally, you also use 2-way dirt paths as the conveyor belt path for your Sparks. In theory, this is really nice and original. In practice, this leaves a lot to be desired. Feeding items into machines require you to always feed from the right side of a path which isn't a big deal at first but it adds an added layer of complexity in the middle to later stages of the game that borders more on being frustrating rather than being challenging. Sparks also have collision with one another and this causes a great deal of traffic jams on splitters and junctions in between your dirt paths. This also means that in order to maximize the resource node output, you have to invest dozens of Sparks to carry the items around for you, and this scales to how far the dirt paths are as well, so one can only imagine how much investment is really needed to maximize the resource output. - Because of the issues with Sparks & Dirt Roads, you cannot get 100% efficiency in output no matter how hard you try. Splitters and Junctions on the road are unavoidable at the later stages of the game and it causes so much jams and issues that you'd rather use several resource output buildings (like loggers) at excess rather than use one to its full 100% efficiency. - The recipe progressions do not make sense. More often than not, you are forced to start from a new resource output location rather than build on your existing layout because the recipes do not have a good flow to them. Add to the fact that laying out your existing paths is very tedious, progressing feels daunting and frustrating rather than it is rewarding. - Automation is greatly limited by how Sparks and Paths work. In games like Factorio, Satisfactory, or Shapez 2, you can have a setup where several different resources nodes from across the map would converge into a centralized manufactoring/assembly hub. This doesn't work here in Oddsparks because of how Sparks and Paths work. You are forced to make specialized locations that produce a specific item then you have to travel around teleporters to collect these items and manually feed them into your other machines. The alternative would be to spend 100s of Sparks to go accross the map and carry the items for you which is completely out of the question. - The "Pikmin mechanic" quickly wears off its charm. In the beginning, when not a lot is going on, the Sparks are really quirky and fun to command around. When you come to the point where you want to produce in scale, controlling Sparks become a nightmare to manage, especially on controller. - The map is very constraining with so many cliffs and early-game unbreakable objects. You want to make the dirt paths as close to the resource nodes as possible (to minimize Sparks to assign) but you also want to give yourself as much space to work with for your production buildings. Building around such constraining terrain is very frustrating. It doesn't help that ramps and elevators only get unlocked at Tier 4 so you are stuck having to navigate through terrain inefficiently in the early to middle stages of the game. Currently, I am about to unlock Tier 5 tech but at Tier 4 I feel like I've already hit a point where it already feels frustrating rather than fun. I dread unlocking new tech because I don't want to set up another Logger-to-Workbenches setup all over again in another area of the map. Hopefully, I am still missing a couple of important tech that would actually make the game much more manageable but currently I am no longer having fun with the logistics part of the game.

This game feels like Picmin and factorio had a cute little wood shaped kid and gave it alot of personality

I have played the game in early access, as well as playtested the hot and cold update and the 1.0 version. In the 1.0 version, I reached the end of the storyline and unlocked everything. I really love this game! It features automation with factories, transport by sparks, trains and logic elements. There's also exploration, some fighting (using the spark creatures) and, in the last part, a tower defense mechanic, where you need to make sure to send in enough fighting sparks of different kinds to keep the spark-throwing cannons fed. For whom? I'm a beginner when it comes to automation game and had a lot of fun, though I was glad to have some help from the very nice discord community. The nice thing is that it's possible to leave out some of the more complex aspects, like logic, if you feel overwhelmed by it. But more advanced players can use it to create very complex, optimized set ups. The game starts slowly, and before you know it you've built a whole network of factories and are transporting materials all over the place. So it pays to make sure to design a clean train system early, otherwise you'll regret it! There's a big jump in complexity once you unlock botany (midgame), where you suddenly have a bunch of different ways of crafting many of the products and circular production lines. It intimidated me at first, but thankfully I tried around and ended up enjoying it very much! And once you've got the tower defense set up, there's a very fun final challenge... but I won't spoil that! Suffice it to say that you will need (almost) everything you learned throughout the game. + very cute graphics + some interesting challenges in the late game + mod support + released game includes possibility of setting difficulty for quests and fights separately + misophonia mode + helpful discord community + developers really active on discord in responding to bug reports and feedback (at least during the early access phase, don't know how it will go later) - jumps in complexity can feel overwhelming - documentation of some features in game not always very clear, but there should be a discord soon