Bleentoro is a strange, yet interesting puzzle game inspired by Factorio playable on iOS. In each level you need to create factories in order to meet specific objectives, usually related to creating a certain number of a specific resource under a certain time. Starting simple enough with a bunch of new mechanics getting added as you progress through the levels, poor controls and confusing inconsistencies prevented me to fully wrap my head around the game, even if I did have a good time with it.
Most level have resources strewn around, or have resource generators that you need to connect to machines in order to combine them into something else that is needed to beat the level. Drawing conveyor belts around is a bit bothersome and often if you don’t create the path you want on the first try you’ll have to delete all of them and start over that segment. The game keeps you in ‘drawing belt mode’ as long as you don’t cancel it (and the cancel button is not near where your fingers are), so if you try to move around the map, it just draws conveyor belts instead. Placing structures (splitters, underground belts, combiners, filters, etc.) has you pick them up at the bottom of the screen and drag them around with a weird offset that makes it difficult to place things where you want them, and rotating them is a hassle.
Control issues aside, there is a lot to like in Bleentoro; The puzzles add a bunch of nice mechanics, like teleporters, trains that carry resources on long distances quickly, liquids (replete with pumps, bottle packers, purifiers and all that) and some strange concept of saboteur briefcases that you need to deal with. Puzzles are usually just figuring out how to make the end result and working backwards from there but the lack of a clear resource hierarchy makes every puzzle more annoying than it should be. There is no clear “resource A plus resource B always equals resource C”, it’s always different, sometimes it’ll give C, sometimes it’ll give D, sometimes they just won’t add and you’ll need to add A and C to make B, so you always have to look at the list of specific recipes for that one level instead of learning combinations that would work for the rest of the game. I also wish that when a level is running there would be some display of the objectives on screen in some fashion, so you wouldn’t need to check the objectives menu all the time to see if you’re going to make it.
Overall, Bleentoro is a fine attempt at making a factory puzzle game. The core concept is really interesting and the mechanics work all together fairly well, it’s just things around the edges of gameplay, like controls and usability of certain systems that made me bounce off (after playing quite a bit, so it’s not all bad at all!). I still think this is neat and interesting, so if you wanna get your factory thinking cap on, I’d recommend it!
