Under Review seeks to review the indie games that fall somewhere between complete unknown and massive indie success, the games with only a few thousand reviews that many folks miss. In today’s post we check out the recently released Little Rocket Lab a fun, cozy factory game with an excellent story.
I consider myself a person of contradictions. While I am a fan of building and crafting games, that pure automation experience isn’t what I go to those games for. Games like Shapez which completely strips down the game to nothing but pure automation just doesn’t appeal to me, the reason I like these games is becuase I want to build things for a reason. Sure, the people in my computer aren’t real people, if I don’t create a nice city for them they won’t just sit there in the dirt and suffer, but those trappings of helping others, of being in some kind of situation is almost as important to me as how good the building is. There’s a section of this building fandom that Little Rocket Lab baffles, and it’s these pure automation enthusiasts. They hate that there’s a story. They hate that it’s not ‘efficient’ enough. (Understand it’s not sloppy or poorly executed by ANY metric, it’s just not up the lofty Factorio-like standard that a certain part of the population would like.) Ultimately this game is a hybrid between automation game and cozy town sim, and the danger is that in shooting for the middle, a cozy, beginner-friendly game with a great story and also a fun technical building experience, that you lose both audiences and create a game that is too story heavy for automation fans and too complex for cozy gamers. Little Rocket Lab strikes a wonderful balance between the two, at no point did I feel the story get in the way of my mad dash to smash everything, gather materials, and build the spaghetti factory of my dreams that poured forth from my character’s home and into the nearby town. So depending on where you fall in the automation fandom and why you enjoy the games, you may enjoy Little Rocket Lab. If games like Automachef, Big Pharma, or Good Company are in your library, Little Rocket Lab would fit in perfectly.
