Mindustry is a strange mix of tower defense and factory management where you have to build miners, builders, conveyor belts, research upgrades and collect resources while at the same time defending from enemies that attack your structures in waves using turrets and other means of defense. This game has proven too stressful for me, too unwieldy to play on the iPad, and ultimately too difficult.
The core concept is still interesting, you select a zone on a planet and work there to gather resources in order to be able to launch to another zone and keep progressing around. In order to gather resources, you build drills on patches of minerals and use conveyor belts to bring them around to a central storage core. The controls on iOS makes it very difficult to do so, placing things around doesn’t feel good and the number of extra buttons you have to press to build things makes it bothersome, this might be easier on computer, but this is the version I’ve played.
The way you build things is by moving a little probe around - you lay down the blueprints of what you want to build and then if you move the probe nearby it’ll materialize the various structures you’ve requested - so you need to move around in order to build walls, turrets, conveyor belts and the like. This game could’ve been good being about collecting resources and expanding multiple factories on various spots of the planet, but there is a big tower defense element as well. Like in factorio, sometimes enemies will attack your structures. Unlike that other game, however, they attack in waves set on a timer. This makes thing very hectic and difficult in many ways because you don’t have time to build around, fix structures, upgrade your base, and explore, you have to focus on taking down enemies and this feel disjointed with the better part of the game.
Maybe if there was no timer and you would be able to start other waves at your leisure, maybe if enemies weren’t such a big focus of the game, maybe if the balance was somehow different, I would’ve had a better time with Mindustry. The number of resources you need to get to the next level and unlock new upgrades is such that you’ll need to wait after all waves are defeated - because there is a limited number of waves per map - in order to collect enough and there is no way to do so during the period where you’re attacked constantly. I’m not a big fan on how everything gets destroyed by enemies as well. Ah well, this was worth at least a try from me. It’s a shame, the upgrade system and various maps still could’ve been neat!
