Little Big Workshop Review (READTHEE)
BROKEN MESS
I've known of this game since YouTuber's were hyping it back in 2019-2020, but the visuals alone along with the high price was a turn-off for me, so I never bothered. Now in 2024, I bought it cheap, and I feel ripped off.
CONS:
BUGS: Constructing buildings can lead to bugs where building is not completed, yet messages about construction keep popping up. Same goes for destroying buildings, sometimes tiles just remain while the game keeps popping messages for destroying tiles, charging you every time when you press OK (you can't cancel the order in this bug), but nothing happens. Only solution is to build over the remaining tiles and destroy them again, wasting money and time.
Then there are bugs where moving things either doesn't do anything or if it does, leaves collision behind, blocking the last place anyway. You will have to quicksave and quickload to fix these most of the time, and they happen a LOT of times.
Constant quick save/load is what you'll get used to almost rebooting the game into fixing bugs, like undelivered goods which remain no matter how many times you try to deliver them to market, it only works when you reload the savegame.
Another nice bug is when your ugly workers just get blocked in places where they were moving fine for hours, for no reason. So they sit and cry while a little icon which you probably will miss, comes up telling you something vague about workers not being able to do something. You end up moving machines to free up their walk space, but then machines aren't removed at all for some reason, forcing you to move even more machines like the whole place is blocked (but it isn't).
Game was released in 2019, last updated in 2020. Not sure why this garbage is still on "VERY POSITIVE", but that's Steam for you.
GAMEPLAY: A positive review proclaimed that this game is "One of the best management sims out there!"
If you hit your head like that poor reviewer and proceeded to play this game, I can understand why you'd agree with this. But for the rest, this is THE most generic take on these management sims, with ugly-ass characters and childish "story" to boot. This reminds me of the "WACKY" "Two Point" series. Ugly visuals, trying too hard to be quirky and "funny", but it just looks and feels like shit designed for 12 yr old kids who find dangling keys in front of them entertaining.
Anyway, the game is easy. It's a different matter that broken gameplay, broken AI, and shit-load of bugs will make it a "challenge" for you to get things done in the long run.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3306182450
My favorite part is these annoying as fuck calls you get. Not only will the game reset your speed to lowest, but some cunt of a character will offer you lowest possible pay-job while you are about to max out your shitty workshop.
These calls sometimes happen one after another. Game is so generic that you should be able to set it to max speed, go and make coffee or chai, whatever. But no, you come back to see the fucking speed reset to low for these random calls that can't be stopped. Nice job game devs.
This game is incredibly repetitive, and the longer you go, more flaws show up. At one point, game will start displaying all jobs with negative profit if you were building too much (yes, you pay taxes while building more tiles.. on a table). I guess you can say that people should pay more attention to their expenses, not that the game makes it clear that you should be worried about it (making you believe that you can just expand all over the map easily).
Whatever, it isn't a big deal. What IS a big deal is that the game is still repetitive. You are doing the same thing for hours without any changes or challenges. Game unlocks more materials but you don't use them because it cuts profit, so why the fuck are there more materials? Game doesn't tell you why you should use them.
Oh and a lot of things are so poorly explained, I actually found people complaining about same issues, not explained, on the forum back in 2019, with developer commenting on that issue (but never fixing it). Nice.
UI/UX/VISUALS/SOUND/STORY: For a "BEST MANAGEMENT SIM", UI/UX is passable, story is annoying and sound design (which I ended up muting, tbh) is bland.
Also, the game has a ugly sharpening filter shoved in, making everything look way too aliased. I'm guessing some genius in development team thought it was a good idea to add sharpen to compensate for FXAA blurring, except that you'll end up turning off all advanced visual features to get more FPS as the game runs like shite, since it's another Unity title like City Skylines, with garbage performance. So now you have no FXAA blurring, but you still have sharpening added to make every texture and edge look more contrasty and aliased. Nice.
Anyway, performance is shite the more you build (I was running at 40-50 FPS most of the time at full speed), unless you are running the latest and greatest CPU build.
PROS:
If you want something to play while you watch YouTube videos on a secondary monitor, this fills that criteria. It isn't saying much, but this is an average game which I like to file under "things I can play half-distracted". Gameplay is forgettable, so are the visuals and any attempt at a story. Buy this game on a very deep discount, don't waste money on DLC unless you tried the base game.
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SCRAPPY JUNKYARD - Curator Group
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