Automachef is one of these factory-type game where you place structures and mechanisms around to solve puzzles, using conveyor belts, resource generators and combiners in order to fulfill specific requirements and move to the next stage. In this case the theming is around food, having you cook meat and combine it with bread and cheese in order to deliver burgers, for instance. I really didn’t have a good time with it, I found the mechanisms to be a bit too finnicky and the tutorial didn’t prepare me adequately for the rest of the game (or the game just wasn’t clear about what it wanted).
On its face, the game is pretty straightforward, you get ingredients, cook them, then move them to an Assembler, and then to a delivery station. It already broke down a bit for me when you needed to use robotic arms to move things from machines into conveyor belts, having conveyor belts go to an arm that moved a thing somewhere else didn’t feel that good. The game is fairly complex and you can setup many parameters for machines you place, further enhanced by order-based detectors that allows you to create and process food only when you need to, thus cutting down on power usage, food waste, and space taken.
And this is exactly where things stopped being fun for me, because at the fourth or fifth level, I just couldn’t progress anymore. I used too much power no matter how I tried to rig my kitchen, using the rules I understood from the game at that point in time, and that was it. The game told me I was innefficient, but from the levels before it, I dealt with the puzzle the only way I thought would be correct, but I couldn’t really progress past that.
It’s a bit unfortunate because I like puzzle and automation games, but maybe there was something I didn’t understand or didn’t get. Ultimately, it’s part my fault and part the fault of the game, but it really turned me off on the whole experience. Oh well!
