Smart Factory Tycoon: Beginnings Gameplay Preview

Smart Factory Tycoon: Beginnings gives us a look at a management sim about managing a robot driven factory that produces toys. The game’s design is much closer to the management sim aspect rather than designing the actual production lines. It’s still a pretty relaxing game to play with enough of a focus on production lines.

The game starts you off with one warehouse and a starting budget. You can use that budget to section off rooms in the warehouse into two basic room types, construction rooms and robot rooms. Construction rooms are rooms where you can build machines used in the process of building a product and the robot rooms are rooms where you can build machines to maintain the robots themselves such as charging stations and lubrication stations.

Everything in the factory is run by autonomous robots. You don’t have to interact with the robots at all and you cannot even if you wanted to. You can purchase robots from the robot market place. Each robot has separate stats for values such as how quickly it can operate the machines, how much charge it can maintain, and how long it can work before it needs to be lubricated. The robots with better values obviously cost more so it’s a balancing act of buying enough robots with decent enough stats to efficiently produce the items necessary.

After you have a production room and robot room set up, you need to choose a product to produce. More complicated products have multiple steps and will be more expensive and time consuming to produce. Once you select a product, you simply link the necessary machines in the construction room to the plan for the item. For example, the tutorial starts you off by making rubber duckies. You need one plastic injection machine and one plastic paint station. Once you have those machines, you just link them to the rubber ducky plan and the robots will get to manufacturing them automatically.

The design element of creating your production line is pretty rudimentary compared to games that solely focus on production line design such as Satisfactory and Factorio. People looking for a more involved production line design element may be left disappointed. You just simply need the right machine linked in the plan for the item and everything is taken care of. There’s very little designing to be done. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as people who want a more relaxed game to play will find this right up their alley.

Playing the game feels like most other management sims. You plan out which items you can afford to make that will generate the most profit, make sure you have all the machines you need, make sure you have enough robots, and then set it and forget it. You can pause or speed up time to your liking so you can play this game while doing something else as well.

Overall, Smart Factory Tycoon is pretty solid as a management sim but definitely falls short if you wanted a pure production line design game. It’s perfect for people who want a more relaxed experience.