First Play Review: Industria (2021)

 

I'm generally not an indie gamer, instead devoting my time to established IPs and franchises created by teams of the worlds best developers and distributed by the most greedy of publishers. As of late however, the AAA space has faltered and even the most experienced and successful development outfits have been producing some seriously unoptimised drek. So I said I'd have a look at the indie scene in between ticking off other games in my backlog. While technically Baldur's Gate 3 was an indie game, no one labels it as such due to Larian's AAA war chest and their over 400 headcount, but I did come across a real indie in the form of Industria.

Industria is an Unreal 4 - powered FPS where you play Nora, a scientist in cold-war East Germany who is transported to a parallel universe in search of her co-worker. She discovers the industrial revolution happened a little differently here and seems to have been augmented by an artificial intelligence which has created robot automatons which now rule a seemingly lifeless world.

The premise might sound a bit dodgy and certainly derivative, but once you set this aside it's actually a pretty exciting puzzle-lite shooter. You are given a small arsenal of weapons: pickaxe, pistol, sub-machine gun, bolt-action rifle and pump-action shotgun - that somehow you know instinctively how to use, and are guided over radio by a mysterious local survivor who provides exposition as you shoot your way through an urban sprawl crawling with steampunk-like robots determined to kill you.

The game world, the German-speaking city of Hakavik despite its bleak colour palette, is beautifully rendered in UE4 albeit with a few janky texture seams here and there. The influence of Half-Life 2 over the game is evident as the robotic elements have claimed parts of the 20th century architecture in much the same way as the Combine did in HL2. Enemies are suitably dangerous and unsettling; they are rarely silent but can often be dormant and hidden until you get into range, and then need to react, aim and shoot before they get you.

The primary combat paradigm here is unusual. Provided you look in drawers, cupboards and crates, you're given enough ammo to prevent this being lumped in with survival horror but you're also not given enough ammo to miss too often. You can carry only a pitiful amount of ammo at once so forget any DOOM or even CoD tactics here; this is a game where you only shoot if you can hit your target. It didn't happen me, but I can see that it wouldn't take much to softlock yourself by running out of ammo.

The game isn't too hard (on normal) but you will likely perish a few time before you get used to it, learning enemy movements and level-of-effort required to eliminate them etc. Unfortunately developers Bleakmill decided to limit saves to checkpoints, no manual saves, so death's penalty is to replay sequences since the last checkpoint. There's no logical or technical reason for this and it has no place in modern gaming. That said it's a very short game, clocking in at about 5 hours and in my case I had to add on about 90 minutes of respawn time.

Final Verdict: Industria is a little janky but otherwise solid shooter that goes to show that a small team of indie devs can produce a game that provides less frustration then many AAA releases these days. It wears its Half-Life 2 influences on it's sleeve and while short its thoroughly confusing narrative sets up a forthcoming announced sequel that I hope will have just as interesting a journey. I will just warn that €20 is also a bit too steep for this considering it length and lack of replayability but it's often on 70%/80% off making it worthwhile.

Technicals: 6h 35m playtime though EGS in 3440x1440 @ 175FPS on RTX4070Ti in Windows 11.

Bugs: Display settings would reset after game exit and mouse would be misaligned with menu making it difficult to reset to normal.

Availability:Industria is available through the Seam or GOG for €20.00. Review copy received for free.