The factory genre stripped down to an irreducible element: throughput.

I really like fiddling with algorithms, trying to make things more efficient and elegant. But I bounce off most factory games (assembly line games? process-likes?) because they gate experimentation behind resource scarcity and acquisition.

Shapez skips all that boring stuff so you can focus on the pure joy of fucking around. Infinite resources, infinite space, no fail state. Plus, they dodge all the nasty themes of extraction and colonization that every other game in the genre stumbles into. It's just good vibes, chill music, and me going insane trying to make a rocket ship on a blue and grey background.

If you've played any of the Metal Gear Solid games - games that Intravenous desperately wants to be like - you'll probably have seen some moments of truly weird energy. Not the good sort, like the supernatural bosses and meta storytelling, but stuff more like Kojima's eternal horniness, some racial insensitivity and maybe not managing a sensitive topic quite right. It happens. Thing is, in MGS, these are usually small moments, sometimes trying to make a point (even if quite badly), and almost always fade away in the face of a much grander message and point. And to an extent, I'm ok to take some weird energy and moments from my 20 year old games to get to that stuff.

Now, imagine a game where the whole experience feels like that moment where otacon tells you he's been fucking his mum or whatever. That's intravenous. A game which starts of with some good old homophobia and you spend the rest of it in a revenge quest against some... homeless drug addicts?

It is played so damn straight as well. Intravenous' ultraviolent revenge quest has no nuance and is not the slightest bit self-aware, which makes the game feel super weird when you're just culling dozens of HOMELESS DRUG ADDICTS.

Doesnt help that the game's other big inspiration, to the point of near-plagirism, is hotline miami, and it borrows all of it's ultraviolence, which only compounds the weird vibe more. I get that a bit of a gritty, unpleasant vibe is intended, but it's clear that very little thought has gone into the repurcussions of mixing a bunch of tropes and gameplay elements together which makes the game feel downright vile at times. And not in a kane and lynch 2 "this is meant to make you feel like shit way", more of in a "Holy shit this game dev is down bad" sort of way.

Oh and the gameplay sucks. It's basically hotline miami with more of a stealth beat and one or two gadgets on offer. It suffers from some ludicrously terrible map design that makes hotline Miami 2 look like hotline miami 1, and stealth mechanics that whilst on the surface, quite deep, with light and sound meters to manage and keep a track of - with the lethality so high and even silenced weapons being too loud in a large amount of situations, it ends up super basic, and the map design offers so little in the way of options to tackle stealth scenarios beyond either distractions and then chokeholds or being really quick coming through doors with throwing knives etc. If you've played like one stealth game in the last 20 years, well done, you've already experienced the maximum of what intravenous offers.

For what it's worth, If i was to be really generous I think some level of benefit of the doubt could be given that the extremely questionable content of the game is kinda unintentional, just a result of messily mixing tropes and not thinking through implications of stuff. Even if so, the game is still pretty vile, and generally just kind of sucks.