Playtime: 4.5 Hours
Score: 7/10

A fun but short shooter. I always wanted to play this game with its very Bioshock inspired feel but always read how short it was so I could never justify buying it. But it was recently free on the Epic Games store so I finally dove in.

Gameplay wise, while there aren't any powers like in Bioshock, it's got some solid shooting mechanics. You get a pickaxe, pistol, shotgun, SMG and sniper rifle and they all work well enough. Enemies can kill you pretty quickly so you need to be on your toes and you can't carry that much reload, so you have to be strategic with when you fight. It's functional but I feel like a sequel would need to flesh this all out more. Also some of the enemy types are annoying like the suicide bomber droids, which I just hate seeing in an FPS.

The story I found to be quite interesting with some good dialogue and voice acting. The only issue is the story doesn't really resolve properly by the end, and it's pretty much sequel bait for the already announced, Industria 2. Because of that this game can feel like a tech demo and the second game will probably be what the devs wanted to make in the first place. Still an enjoyable game. I would recommend grabbing it while it's still free or get it when it's on sale.

All Games I have Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/

I'm just so glad that a studio out there took such clear inspiration from the Half-Life franchise, and yet it's almost like a curse upon this game. I just couldn't stop making comparisons in my head and wishing I was playing Half-Life 2 again instead.

Not the be too harsh with this either, it's actually quite impressive what such a small team was able to achieve, especially as a first project. There's a lot to appreciate here. Some environments and set pieces are simply gorgeous, the gunplay is relatively fun and there's some great artistic/dreamy sequences sprinkled throughout the game.

On the other hand, the pacing is way off. You unlock almost all of your weapons in a 20 minutes timeframe, making you go from "guy with an axe" to "fully geared up army man". Since the game lets you know how many empty weapon slots you have left, it's clear that there's not much waiting for you in term of progression pass the 1 hour mark.

The fight encounters are also weirdly balanced. Sometimes you'll be fighting 2-3 enemies at once, and sometimes the game will throw 25 enemies at you, seemingly out of nowhere. There should be nothing wrong with this, but it's just not satisfying. You don't have a gravity gun or any other creative tool/skill to make each encounter unique. So you'll just spam your guns and alternate between them when they are out of ammo. There's some explosive barrels here and there so the devs clearly thought of some other ways to approach the fight, but it's just not enough.

The story, I'm sorry to say, is not really griping and the ending will leave you with more question than answers. Things also seemed to have been rushed in the last 20 minutes unfortunately.

The music is passable, even pretty at times on its own, but I felt like it rarely meshed well with the game itself. It's a weird feeling, like I just re-listened to some of the songs on Spotify and liked a lot of them, but never felt like they enhanced the experience while I was playing.

There's other thing floating in my mind but I'll stop there. Still glad I tried it, I'm wishing for more stuff with similar inspirations and references in the future. Also saw that the devs of this game are teasing something new on Twitter so I'll surely be on the lookout for whatever project they'll release in the future.

Enjoyable little fps experience with some survival horror vibes. I liked this one a lot. The environments are cool, and pretty, I found the story interesting and enjoyable. The guns all sound and shoot nice, decent enemy variety for a short game. Only ran into one bug at the very beginning of the game, otherwise smooth sailing. That said, as I mentioned the game is VERY short, it works for what they did, but I would definitely recommend waiting on a sale. I looks forward to the sequel and seeing on how they improve on this and how the story progress.

I'm writing this review almost exactly a year after playing Industria and almost exactly a month after Industria 2 was announced. And somehow it speaks volumes about the first one when I start this short review with the word that spontaneously escaped me when it was announced: “Why?”

Industria is a nice first person shooter with an interesting world and one or two memorable moments. But in its entirety, everything felt very aimless and disjointed. Not to mention that I found the shooter gameplay very rudimentary and very little fun. The level design was also very superficial - both in terms of gameplay and visuals. Don't get me wrong: I don't regret my almost five hours. But there would be no real reason for me to recommend the game to anyone. Industria was rather a quickly forgotten game, with few highlights and all the more boredom.

So why is there a successor in development? From a pure player's perspective, I find it difficult to answer this question. The gameplay foundation could definitely do with an update and the worldbuilding definitely has potential. But was Industria really so successful that it was worthwhile for the studio? It seems to be.

Played it two times, even though I rarely play singleplayer games twice.

I love everything about it; Graphics, Sound, Music, Gameplay, Atmosphere, Mood, Pacing, Voice Acting, etc.

It is a love letter to HALF-LIFE² and you can see it in every pixel.

At one point in the middle of my playthrough, I had a thought about what kind of people the developers of this game are. My conclusion back then is that they're a bunch of good ordinary folk looking to fill a hole in the world. The thing is, games like Industria are quite rare these days. A slower paced singleplayer FPS game in the year 2021 would stand out easily, as the market is simply filled with wacky crazy fast paced shooters. Industria certainly does a decent job of filling the void, despite having more than enough flaws to warrant descriptions such as "janky", "low budget" and "unpolished."

The story is... weird. It does have a strong emotional moment near the end, and the ending makes it more interesting, but overall it's nothing worth thinking too much about. It's quite a short game (4 hours), and the story felt decent enough to engage through that timespan.

The game takes place in mostly urban levels, and you'll be using your flashlight often since it can be quite dark at times. The level design is just fine for the most part. There's an occasional feeling of things being too spaced out or empty, but that's it. There's barely any unique models which makes the environments (especially indoors) feel samey.

Gunplay feels very loose, as most of the enemies you'll fight will attack in melee range. The guns here feel more like a luxury, as there's barely enough ammo to use against all the enemies. You're encouraged to use your pickaxe to save ammo, and save the guns for when things get chaotic. Enemy variety is not great, since as said before, most of them don't use guns. I guess they do it to hide the weak gunplay. The overall difficulty is good, as you won't be feeling too comfortable at any point, but it's also not too punishing.

Graphically it looks decent on PS5. It's certainly not an AAA game. The game runs okay for the most part, although at the time of writing, there's an alarming level of model pop-ins. Also, The feedback of shooting your guns is just okay, although the sound effects are pretty good.

At this point, I realize that the game sounds more bad than good, but it is what it is. It's one of those games where you know it's not very well made, but you still enjoy it a lot. Like I said before, the game felt like it's made by a bunch of good folk doing their best. It might not be worth $20 for most people, but at a discount, it's worth the shot.

Deeply flawed and extremely inconsistent from level to level, but a clearly promising start from a small group of developers whose talent is obvious.

Environment design ranges from gorgeous and almost AAA-quality to "unfinished Source map" with random fullbright props, badly authored LODs, and weird render occlusion problems. Ray-traced lighting is very pretty but also drops performance to 15 FPS on an RTX 3080 Ti - but only on some maps. On others, it's fine.

Despite the visually intriguing setting, the story fails to raise any interesting questions, which is just as well, because it doesn't answer any of them either. At least two of the three (3) characters are likeable and have personalities.

This feels like a piece of good scifi short fiction in game form. Great melancholy, mysterious vibes, but just a little underbaked feeling in the end, like it could have used another couple months of polish with regard to performance and some of set-dressing of the later levels. Performance issues aside though its a really gorgeous looking and sounding game and I enjoyed my time with it, and I will def keep an eye on what Bleakmill does next. More short games that swing as big as this one did production-wise, please.

Industria is such a clear passion project by a tiny team, so its really hard to be upset with the final result. It's a love letter to Bioshock and Half-Life and it functions as a pretty short little FPS campaign that offers a cool 3-5 hour experience, with a side serving of jank. Unfortunately, I do think it has a few too many issues for me to give it a higher rating, but this is one of the highest 3 star scores I've given.

Combat wise, the game is actually decent, and while the encounters are never that complex, the fact that each enemy has a weakness you can figure out through experimentation is cool to see for such a small game. I decided to play on the "Hardcore" difficulty, which gives you less resources, less health, and only allows you to save when you find a typewriter. And for my money, this is the way to play since its short and isn't really that hard to begin with. The lack of saves actually offered some tense moments, and the constant conservation of flashlight batteries helped make the experience feel a bit more dynamic. This is also helped by the exploration being decent, as there are a few times where you can straight up miss a typewriter if you didn't explore the whole area. And while most of the gameplay is survival horror style, there are about 3 fully combat focused sections. 2 of which I think are actually solid, and then 1 of which has an unbelievably stupid design choice that is very frustrating. Thankfully its only one section, but when the game is only 3-5 hours long, it does stand out a bit more.

Visually, Industria has a really cool robo-dystopian vibe and it does a great job incorporating eastern European architecture into a futuristic setting. The game also features several raytracing settings, which is nice to see in such a small game. Unfortunately, these settings do come at the cost of very inconsistent performance, ranging anywhere from 40-120fps with RTX on (Running on a 2080 and Ryzen 5800x at 1440p). As a result, I opted to mostly play without RT just to make things consistent, but the ambient occlusion and shadows are noticeably a bit worse that way. However even with RT enabled, the indirect lighting is basically non-existent which is a bit disappointing to see, especially since large portions take place indoors.

From a narrative standpoint... yeah its there I guess. It's just pretty vague sci-fi mumbo jumbo that isn't really explained or developed much, since the game is so short. It's not bad, and there are a few interesting plot points and ideas but it's so sparse that its kinda impossible to feel much of a connection to it after only 4 hours. It's better than nothing, but I won't be recalling Nora's emotional journey any time soon.

For what it's worth though, I think the devs managed to craft a very competent experience that is certainly worth checking out if you're a fan of the style. It's rough around the edges, and suffers as a whole from it's short runtime, but like I said in the opening, it's really hard to be upset with this, considering this small team was barely able to even get it released. So for that, I applaud their efforts, and I'm now even more excited to see if Atomic Heart can tackle some of that Bioshock vibe we've been missing.

Dieses Spiel hat starke Tendenzen zum Survival-Horror, besonders durch die teils stockdunklen Passagen, die mit einer Lampe erhellt werden müssen. Zudem habe ich es auf dem Hardcore-Schwierigkeitsgrad durchgespielt, also konnte ich nur an sehr spärlich platzierten Schreibmaschinen speichern.

Ressourcenknappheit war auch ein sehr stressiger, aber durchaus spannender Teil des Gameplays – Batterien, Munition und Heilflaschen waren sehr rar, was bei mir weitere Horror-Assoziationen geweckt hat, die ich im Vorhinein nicht erwartet habe. Generell war die ständige Angst vor der nächsten Ecke oder Treppe in düsteren Innenräumen ein nennenswerter Bestandteil meines Spieldurchgangs.

Für mich war die Story leider ein wenig unverständlich, das Ende kam auch sehr abrupt und hat keinerlei Fragen geklärt.

Die Maps waren oft gerade so fertiggestellt worden und abseits des Hauptpfads nur sehr spärlich eingerichtet. Grafisch ist es sehr ansprechend für ein Indiespiel, das Raytracing ist da noch ein netter Bonus, der mal mehr, mal weniger ins Gewicht fällt. Der Gegner-Stil erinnert teilweise an Bioshock, die Umgebung hingegen sehr an Half-Life 2. Besonders schön fand ich die Zugfahrten und den bedrohlich rötlichen Lichtschein der Lampen auf manchen Gegnern in stockdunklen Treppenhäusern.

Zuletzt noch zum allerschwächsten Glied der Bewertungskette – der Technik. Die Performance des Spiels ist generell extrem bescheiden, sobald Raytracing an ist, ich konnte nur dann 60+ FPS erreichen, wenn ich DLSS auf High Performance gestellt habe, was einige feinere Texturen verschwommen aussehen lässt, was ich aber noch verkraften konnte. Nicht auszuhalten waren jedoch die mittendrin fehlenden Übersetzungen, fehlenden Wörter, Wortdopplungen und generell Glitches überall – eine ganze Szenerie lang musste ich z. B. laute Geräuschen von im Boden steckenden Ragdolls ertragen, die trotz erneutem Laden nicht verschwanden.

Insgesamt also ganz knapp vor der Negativ-Wertung, aber durch das gute Gun- und Gameplay eine Überlegung wert.

The game runs so badly that it's the first thing to come to mind about it. Doesn't even look that great despite sacrificing any hopes for decent performance.
The combat is slow, simple, and not particularly satisfying.
Level design is fine, but the incredibly slow movement speed makes it feel boring despite it having lots of detail.
To encourage exploration, the game has a ton of resources hidden in lockers, drawers, and boxes laying around. Too bad the ammo limit is literally one spare magazine per gun - the main character can carry a pistol, smg, sniper rifle and shotgun on her, but not two magazines for any of these weapons. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't make gameplay better.
The only reason I had to stick around was the story. The voice acting grew on me, and I thought the setup for the story had potential to be interesting, but the story ended before it really began, and it spent most of the runtime simply faffing about, not exploring any character or the world that much. There were little interactions that I found cute, but that was during banter, not actual character moments.

Industria is a really short and rather uneven adventure that presents a lot of great ideas, but doesn't really provide a conclusion to any of them. This feels like a really great first chapter in a longer game.

I did like it but overall the experience will be mixed for many. I think if it focused on its mystery more and provided a concrete resolution to its story this would have been an easy recommend. As it stands it's more of a "maybe check it out on sale" and that's a shame because what's here is really good.

For such a short game, I do have a lot to say on this. The game feels like a child of Half-Life and BioShock, not really in all gameplay aspects for either, but in tone and setup. Gameplay is mixed primarily of FPS segments, platforming, with some basic puzzle solving. I have to give kudos for this game being one to put me on edge a lot. Ammo and health is so scarce that I always felt like I was just getting through.

In the end though, the game has major flaws. It's short, absurdly short. I finished it in around two and a half hours. This hurts the game in more ways than one because of how many questions are left unanswered. This feels like it should have more, but it doesn't.

Do not buy this game full price. Effort is clearly there, but this game has zero replay value and again, is absurdly short. I highly recommend picking it up on sale though.

My impressions when I played the demo for this during the Steam Nextfest a few years ago were mixed: on one hand it was hard to overlook the interesting sci-fi setting and environments, immediately evocative through the richness of the atmosphere of a late victorian-looking world taken over by killer machines; on the other it was just as difficult to ignore the lackuster combat and less than optimal performance. I was hoping these issues would be ironed out by the time the full release came around, but it wasn' so. If anything, things got worse.

This is a 2-3 hour game whose playtime is evenly split between shooting, puzzle solving and just plain wasting the player's time crossing empty areas, either listening to radio exposition or scavenging for supplies. The developer ensured you will be on the lookout for pickups by greatly limiting the amount of ammunition you can carry, as well as making the enemies quite spongy in regards to their health pools. unfortunately this also greatly limits the fun, because few things are less entertaining in an FPS of this sort than having to watch every shot you take for fear of running out of ammo. You also have a limited flashlight (always a bad idea) with a depleting meter and related battery pickups, but which doesn't seem to ever run out, even when it hits zero, which begs the question of why the mechanic is there to begin with.

Regarding ammo, a little math: you can carry 36 pistol rounds and 64 SMG rounds, but a standard enemy takes 5-8 shots to kill, meaning you will see your resources dwindle very quickly, to the tone of 7-8 enemies leaving your supplies dry, and that's if you are accurate and waste not. There are also a shotgun and sniper rifle (12 total rounds each) which are a bit more ammunition efficient, but will still end up empty in any situation involving sustained combat. It's just not fun at all, especially since the melee attacks are beyond useless, as most enemies will damage you instantly when coming close enough.

The game being this short, the enemy variety is lacking to say the least: there is a vacuum cleaner-looking robot that kamikazes to you and explodes, there is a slow melee based one, a soldier type with a machine gun (which drops no ammo), a slighly faster late-game melee variant that arcs electricity at you, and a dog-like type you'll only face once. Not much at all, which makes even such a short game feel repetitive.

AI isn't great either: near the end of the game there is a Half-Life 2 set piece where you need to activate two levers and wait a minute for an elevator to come down, while you fend off waves of respawning enemies. Now, you could stand and fight them, depleting your stocks of ammunition in a second flat, or you could just jump on a table and in so doing break the enemies' pathfinding, since they can only "see" you when you have your feet firmly on the ground. The results are pretty hilarious, since you can just wait on top of a table as the enemies swarm around it, unable to find you, and then make a run for the elevator without firing a single shot.

The story is nothing you haven't seen before: in late 1980s East Germany, a dimensional travel experiment goes awry, sending its creator somewhere else in the space-time continuum, with his inexplicably militarily gifted colleague/lover going after him to the rescue, only to find that time has passed very differently and 20 years have gone by between the point he arrived and when she does. The rest is pretty much what you expect, without any major twists and turns.

The real issue here is that the voice acting leaves a bit to be desired: while the part of the man who talks to you over the radio is generally well acted, the protagonist is not, often using the wrong tone for the situation and generally coming off as inexpressive and irritating. One more example of a script that could have yielded better results with some simple emotional annotations for each scene. Also, and quite disconcertingly, everyone sounds American which, for a game starring people from East Germany, and made by a German studio at that, feels quite out of place.

There are a few simple puzzles peppered throughout the experience, usually nothing much more complex than activating a few levers and valves in the correct order or following a chemical recipe on a blackboard. To stretch out the play time, aside from the aforementioned walking segments and direct exposition, we have oniric interludes in which you run around an empty office building reading text files and looking at some sort of theater play that doesn't seem to mean anything. It feels pretty transparent why all of that is there. The most aggravating thing about it, is that designing a few more combat set pieces would have been a far more engaging way to squeeze and extra hour out of the game than whatever this is.

One final mention goes to the technical side: while the game looks pretty good, thanks to Unreal Engine 4, as well as good art, lighting and animations, the performance is just as uneven as it was in the demo, even on computers that far surpass the recommended system specs. Stutters and frame drops while dynamically loading new areas are very frequent, and there are quite a few unresolved bugs at that. From the Steam discussions it sounds like the developer has given up on patching the game and moved on to the sequel, so what you have here is what you'll get. At least they patched a game-breaking bug that plagued early adopters on release, which is something.

Industria makes a great first impression, but it doesn't take long to realize the combat is unsatisfying due to stupid and spongy enemies, the story is lackluster and the performance is barely acceptable. Maybe the sequel will be better and fulfill the potential left untapped, but as for this first outing, it can't really be recommended.

PROS
+ Interatividade absurda com o cenário
+ Armas que soam muito bem e são muito boas de usar
+ Ambientação fantástica e bastante única

CONTRAS
- História Fraca
- Combate Corpo a Corpo péssimo
- Variedade baixa de Inimigos
- Personagens sem motivação e mal explorados
- Péssima otimização

O Jogo é uma experiência bem diferente de muita coisa que eu joguei, se inspira fortemente em Half-Life e isso fica visível durante muitos momentos do jogo, mas a curta duração e a falta de motivação dos personagens junto com a péssima otimização (RTX 2070 e I7 10700K chegando a 15fps em momentos sem nenhum inimigo) dificultam bastante a experiência, se o jogo ficar por volta de 15~20 reais, pegue e aproveite a experiência que o jogo proporciona mas não espere o Half Life 3, uma experiência que demonstra o quão promissor a desenvolvedora é

the highlight of the industria was no doubt the traversing through the city gates towards the countryside. a long train ride, somber and quiet, gazing around you as the environment changes. collapsing down too the narrative of your pursuit of your lost love with brent's own love lost. delicately done, the pace of the ride giving us enough to feel a duration of time, and the freedom of our camera left me to look behind me once i had past the city gates. i stared at the city as brent's passing words gave momentary hope but greater longing for something else. a regret, maybe, at the thought of leaving.

what is disappointing is the larger framework around this game failing to do much of anything narratively at all. the totality of the game almost spoils the aforementioned moment with its purposeless ambiguities that feel more for the sake of allowing a sequel if the economics aligned.

Industria is a short half-life clone set in Germany, which is full of contrasts.
The game has a really immersive beginning but ends with an unsatisfying cliffhanger.
The game has a really intuitive level design but only has two good combat encounters.
The shooting is alright, but you are only shooting metal robots, which don't have that "cool impact feel."
The dialogues are decent, but the main protagonist voice actor is annoying at times.
The graphics are decent, but the game runs like trash.
Etc, etc...

In the end, despite the flaws, I enjoyed my time with the game, and the short length stopped the gameplay loop from becoming boring, but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless you are a Half-Life fan and really want to play a very similar game in a different setting.

I think this game is fantastic, I was immersed from beginning to end, and being immersed in a great game that you're playing for the first time is one of the greatest feelings a game can give you. It's short, at about 3.5 hours, but it's paced in a way that the game feels like it's not missing anything and the price is fair for the length. The graphics are great even with ray tracing turned off, but the game is currently pretty hard to run, the devs seem to be working on optimization so this may be fixed in the future, but I held a mostly solid framerate on my PC with RTX and DLSS off and everything else on maximum so I didn't mind the performance issues. I loved playing this game, and if you have powerful enough PC I can't recommend this game enough, it's one of the greatest FPS games I've played in a very long time.