Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure Steam Charts & Stats

The game is fun, automation (while Clunky at times) shows great thought processes and rewards those who experiment with the logic systems as well. One thing I could wish for was a more genuine use for the village like being able to decorate it yourself, even if it isnt required.

Pikmin + Factorio had a baby and it's good I love riding the logistic network things Separate Audio Controls for Workstations good feature, I prefer a nice hum to the factories Just unlocked trains, I'm super excited!

I love playing this game! And i am interested in the new updates :) Automate, travel, fight, build, decorate, trains, cute little Sparks,... this game has a lot of different things that make it interesting and funny!

I'm only a few hours in, but so far the pacing feels off. You're unlocking logic gates quicker than materials. You're having to run back and forth to town to turn in quests which slows the pace. There's large rocks and trees that you can't deal with that cause production problems. So far I haven't found a way to effectively connect 2 factories to 1 tree will having both function at decent performance. I'm having to take lots of time out to farm Aether every 30 minutes, which slows the pacing. It's just clunky in the beginning. I do feel like things will get better and I'll keep playing, but since it's EA it might be best to put on your wishlist and wait to see if things improve. I'd love to see pacing in the early game get better; so you capture engagement early on.

This game is sooo much fun! Picked it up on sale, and would recommend it even if it's not on sale! :) If you love automation games this one is a nice cozy surprise!

-Can't cast spells, despite the wizard's cloak and staff -Can't place a rope (zipline) directly downwards -Cannons suck ass; they don't have any range, even though they're expensive and cool -I don't like RTSing a guy down with my little guys; I want to beat his ass with a stick

At this point in time I cannot recommend this game. Issue #1 Terrain The areas where you can build are relatively small. This isn't because the map is too small. It's because you can't manipulate the terrain or build above it. Small hills dot the map. You can build paths over them or add ramps. Unfortunately, most are too small to build any buildings on top, making them dead areas. To make matters worse there are also plots for building critical buildings (shrines) scattered around as well. These plots can't be made by the player (or moved), so wherever they are, that's where those buildings have to be placed. Mountain terrain doubles down on all of these problems. The buildable areas are much smaller and it requires a maze of zip lines, cannons and elevators to get your resources to a usable area. Issue #2 Paths and Throughput You can only make paths on a 2D plane. There are no bridges to go over paths or elevated paths. With one input and output, this would not be a problem. If you could change the inputs to different sides of a building this would be less of a problem. All inputs go in the front and outputs at the back. This forces you to put intersections across paths for buildings with multiple inputs. For some buildings this is less of an issue. You can just space out the buildings to give more room. For shrines (they build units and refine critical resources), the plots they're built on are fixed on the map in clusters. You can't move the plots so a tighter network of paths and intersections needs to be made. As more units get added to the paths to increase throughput, traffic jams lock everything up. Units that can carry more resources require a path in and out of each input, making two inputs difficult and three inputs impossible because there's no space between inputs. It is possible to get around some of this using storage close to the inputs of a building at a large sacrifice of building area. Most of this could be cured with a simple bridge to allow paths to cross without interfering with each other. A bridge would be helpful in the mountains as well. Crossing gaps between plateaus would make gathering resources much easier and more efficient. Issue #3 Expanding Production Production shortfalls will cause you to completely rebuild your bases because the terrain is so cluttered with shrine plots and changes in terrain height. When the get rebuilt they'll be stretched out over huge areas and will have to be connected by rail or extensive paths that eat up buildable area. What I wouldn't give for elevated paths, the ability to stack production buildings and manipulate terrain. Issue #4 Rail Lines Trains are required because in the later game you need to move resources back and forth across the map. Trains are a chore to set up. You can't zoom out far enough to see both pillars (all trains are elevated for some reason) resulting in unsatisfying wobbly rail lines. The trains are too slow and the cars do not carry enough. Train station placement is limited due to map design. Issue #5 Temperature Temperature optimization is not fun. Each type of resource requires a specific environmental temperature to maximize output. You can achieve this with buildings that generate heat or cold (using up more space you don't have). You can also get the same effect by building in a warmer or colder climate. By the time this becomes available, you will have several established bases, and EVERYTHING will have to move and be reworked. Some optimizations don't even make sense. Copper smelting, for example, requires -3 temperature. To me, a higher ambient temperature would make melting ore more efficient. Colder temperatures would make the foundry burn more fuel and take longer to heat in a cold climate. This is not a terrible game. I'm just not recommending it in it's current state. The late game play is more of a chore than fun.

Oddsparks is well... odd... it is a unique take on adventure with *limited* automation. I have to lean towards a down vote for a few reasons. - Missions require you to create or find objects that you do not have access to with no clear in-game guidance (reddit helps here). - manual resource collection and mini-battles are key parts of the game which are painful and tedious - Managing sparks and automation should be improved; it not easy to change sparks as you get access to new ones There are some interesting concepts and the game has potential if they could improve gameplay.

Pikmin mixed with automation. What's not to like? The good: - I love their take on conveyor belts. It's a very interesting system and very different from everything else. - No electricity, so you can go as big as you want from the start. - I love the style and the artwork. It looks really good. - It's not hard, but it's not simple either. I strongly recommend it for people who haven't played automation games before. The meh: - I've played many automation games, and I sometimes found myself fighting my muscle memory to get things done. I hope they implement something like ctrl+left click to send all of one product into a box. Also, having to press B or T every time I want to build instead of having my quick bar always available, makes the building process quite tiresome. - The map doesn't have an god view, which is sad. - Having 20 sparks following you around is great, but I often have to put them away when working on my factory, because it's impossible to see. The bad: - The quest system. I hate this so much it made me consider not recommending this game. Your goal on each tier of technologies is not to craft one product that you automate, but instead you need to create five, and manually deliver them to people in your town to unlock new stuff. It's a massive chore, and it drains the fun of the game. I've only played for 10 hours, so maybe this will change once I start working on the third area, but please, please, PLEASE, consider changing this mechanic. EDIT: I've unlocked chests to automate quest deliveries, but it doesn't make the mechanic any less anoying.

I want to write this review to address other people's criticisms on whether I believe them to be reasonable or not as I think a lot of them aren't very fair, but will provide my opinion alongside. I've beaten the game and have over 66 hours on record, and have played other factory games like Factorio and DSP (about to play shapez 2 as I'm writing this). I've seen a lot of comments regarding having to manually "farm" aether gems and killing animals outside of operating the factory. While the main "miniboss" type creatures need to be killed for specific resources, you really don't need to do it a lot except a little early-midgame but mostly towards endgame and exploring the map and collecting the gems from the stone structures gives you plenty to not have to go around farming them, and you will also eventually get ways to automate them about mid-game becoming more and more efficient. The only enemy that was really annoying was the squid miasma things as you constantly have to recall your sparks (which needs to feel more responsive) or just wait. Every other enemy was fine even the giant turtle. I do think that some enemy locations are pretty frustrating especially the ice rams given that they don't have map icons and are needed a lot. The de-spawners can actually move enemies into a different part of your base that you don't want them in so then you'd need another one. People forget that this game is supposed to have combat, how is this worse than something like factorio or DSP where you'd literally have to rebuild destroyed systems and stop what you're doing everytime there's an enemy attack (who initiates the combat btw)? This criticism doesn't make sense. Exploration is a big part of the game imo, but feels good doing so as you can uncover some better locations to do setups. I do agree though that some areas are too heavily restricted in terms of building/pathway placement and resource accessibility and I believe that some of this probably stems from the random generated maps. A big help would be to have bridges for sparks to go over other paths/buildings, or ways to cross paths on hills. Teleportation areas are also frustrating in the cave regions (maybe I just got really unlucky). I think map generation could use some work. A logistics update would be amazing. Some other concerns I've seen are about moving materials around and having to run back and forth a lot. My response to this is to simply take your time setting up your automated trains and spark paths. At first I realized what people were saying, but I just took a break from progression, set up some automation, and everything was fine. Once you start learning new technologies, it's fine to setup brute force systems until you get the complete technology for automation, then set that up immediately. You shouldn't need a caveman setup for very long. I really believe this to be an area of unnecessary criticism because the entire premise of the game is setting up automation in the first place. Take some time learning how to operate some simple logic gates and pathways, enjoy the game, and make sure to invest into the hauler sparks asap because they are ridiculously fast and efficient compared to the carry sparks as well as using STONE PATHS not dirt paths once you unlock them. You need to learn how haulers path differently though. Stop rushing the quests then getting upset that you're manually moving stuff. Setup. Automation. Trains are very underestimated in terms of practicality as they solved basically any long distance issues I had. They need to be much faster though, not sure why they are so slow especially in reverse. The supply chests are also very very nice to invest in for crafting and I used one for every type of material to avoid carrying too much random stuff. Some resources seemed intentionally placed forcing you to setup a new automated system for 1 item (unless I again just got unlucky with map gen) but things like rope, limestone/explosives, tree placements, stone quarry placements, copper ore, were a bit annoying at times. Also, make sure that you're using coal for fuel and not just wood. It's so much easier and better to just setup separate coal systems at each major area you start. There should also be a way to maintain the stone paths in your inventory too without re-filling all the time. Maybe a separate inventory area for those. The entire cave area generally seems bad. There are obstacles everywhere, the only resource you really need is copper ore which can be automated in the mountains later at much higher efficiencies, no fuel systems (ironic), and you have to dig everywhere and half the time it has to be with the consumable drilling sparks. The mountains were way better, but the one issue I kept running into was maintaining the copper ore and volcanic soil from the geode clusters at the arboretum. Running the feeders for it were kind of a pain as well. I probably could have just used more feeders and gotten the clusters faster, or ran another arboretum, but it seemed too slow for how much production relied on it and how much efficiency I placed into it. Overall the mountains were pretty fun. The random ice seal popping up would be kind of annoying though and please for the love of god REMOVE THE ICE SLOW FROM THE CHARACTER my god it's like a 10 second -50% movement penalty that happens a lot. Overall the game felt amazing to play. Everything was very responsive, the UI seemed fine to me (which apparently others didn't think so, idk why someone who probably didnt even use the electrical UI system, considering they didn't use trains or gates, complained about it), the pacing felt pretty good, the production flow made sense and there was that nice feeling of satisfaction on removing outdated systems like. I really enjoyed my time playing and hope future updates will provide some kind of long term optional progression pushing you to optimize systems and maximize efficiencies as well as options for spark travel and map layout.