Idle Industries is not that bad if you know exactly what you are getting into - a free idle game loosely based around collecting resources, crafting items and selling them to make money. I had a fine time with it, even if it ultimately was a bit like junk food and if the layers upon layers of free to play mechanics slathered over the whole thing made it a bit of a mess.
The core concept of the game is fine enough. You are on an island with resource production points, factories and trucks. Each location has a production rate and a truck capacity that you can improve, so the ultimate idea is to balance resources with item production so you have just the right amount of everything in order not to have surpluses and deficits. Trucks then sell your built products to make money, which you use to unlock new resources, factories, recipes and all that. When you have completed a few missions - such as making a certain number of an item, tapping on trucks a certain number of times, etc. - you sell the island, get a few boosts and restart on a new island with a different configuration. Maybe this time you have bridges that you have to repair, maybe there’s a new resource.
The experience kind falls apart in two ways, first of all, besides the surface level of optimization that you can do to make sure you have enough resources to do what you want, there is nothing left besides that. In a real factory game you’ll have a big world to explore and resources to get all over to speed things up, but not here. At some point you just have to wait longer and longer periods of time for things to progress. Secondly, there is so much free-to-play cruft that I can’t remember everything. Season passes, loot boxes, daily bonuses, spins, events that send you in a different map with leaderboards, the whole nine yards.
If you just want to waste some time looking at trucks driving around and feel like you are an industry titan, managing a few levers to make sure everything is working in the best of the capacity this game allows you, Idle Industries might be okay. If you want anything deeper than that, I’d say look elsewhere!
