Automachef

This is a fun, simple game where you automate a kitchen and in so doing somehow prevent the destruction of the Earth. I got this game as a free giveaway on Epic. There are different game options, but I only played the campaign. I completed every level and all optional conditions (except the ingredients condition on the last level) and it took me about 30 hours.

THE GOOD:

• It has a fun story as part of the campaign
• 30 campaign levels allow you to learn how to play as you go along, and introduce new challenges in bite-sized pieces.
• The overall game, where you lay out components and then organize them to work together, is quite fun! It can be very challenging at times to achieve all the optional objectives, but it almost always feels achievable.
• The UI is well-designed and works smoothly for smaller levels.
• The Thanksgiving and Chinese New Year additions are fun. They introduce some new ingredients and machinery, and a few subtleties of the recipes create new challenges.

THE BAD:

• The goal to use fewer than X ingredients is sometimes quite arbitrary and annoying to accomplish. Since the meal orders in each level are semi-random, a build that succeeds in one run of the level can fail in the next run. A lot of fine-tuning, running, re-running, and luck is required. This is especially onerous on the later levels with longer run times.
• Assembly-language programming is required to solve some of the levels (especially the optional conditions and the later levels). I am ok with this, but most players will probably find this very difficult or frustrating.
• The graphics use an isometric projection, but when you try to select multiple machines with your mouse in a click-and-drag the selection square is a perfect square. It doesn't follow the angle of the isometric projection! This makes it quite difficult to select a large collection of machines.
• It's onerous to upgrade or downgrade a large number of machines (especially in later levels, where you have many machines). When you want to switch strategy it requires a lot of repetitive labour. It would be nice to be able to place a machine on top of an existing machine to replace it and keep your settings—or select several machines and set them all at once to the same setting.

THE UGLY:

• There are still quite a few bugs in what is otherwise a mature game. The problem can usually be solved by removing the offending machinery and replacing it with an identical one. But it still causes you to waste time debugging your setup, only to discover that a game bug is causing the failure.
• Order Reader Bug: where the Order Reader was only activating when the order was on top, even though only an Advanced Order Reader is supposed to have that ability.
• Assembler Bug: where ingredients placed inside one Assembler arrive in a different Assembler.
• Computer Bug: where when you set an order in the Computer and then connect a machine to the Computer, the order you previously set gets erased.
• A Computer can't read the contents of a bin, even though the simpler Counting Machine can!
• The Computer documentation has mistakes. For example, it tells you that there's a TT register for time, but there is no such register!