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.

This is like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, if Jeanne met Cthulhu at the end.

For how amusing the concept is, no amount of metacommentary about housewife drudgery and repetition can cancel the fact they made an agonizingly repetitive game, even when just half an hour long, and the broken physics and Unreal Engine 4 control glitches do not help. Just one more house chore in the rotation (like laundry) would have done the variety a world of good, while still maintaining the themes unaltered.

Still worth playing for what it is.

This is like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, if Jeanne met Cthulhu at the end.

For how amusing the concept is, no amount of metacommentary about housewife drudgery and repetition can cancel the fact they made an agonizingly repetitive game, even when just half an hour long, and the broken physics and Unreal Engine 4 control glitches do not help. Just one more house chore in the rotation (like laundry) would have done the variety a world of good, while still maintaining the themes unaltered.

Still worth playing for what it is.