ranzware
The last thing I need in my life is another factory game, if only because allowing any factory game into your life risks it being consumed entirely by its sprawling, hopelessly absorbing logistics puzzle. But then Cordyceps Collective went and mashed up Factorio with last year’s colony simulation Empire of the Ants, and now I see I’m going to lose the second half of February to Microtopia.
Releasing in just a few weeks, Microtopia invites players to “become the hive mind of a robot ant colony” designing logistics networks for your automaton insects to produce and convey resources across an elegant industrial circuit-board. Starting with a robotic ant queen, you must nurse cute metal larvae into baby ants, draw pathways to tell them where to move, and place down sensors and logic gates to instruct them on how to interact with your factory. Collecting resources and placing down structures lets you upgrade your ants into different types, like flying ants, digger ants, and, er, “inventor” ants, which presumably help you research new tech.
You aren’t limited to one factory in Microtopia either. Once you’ve established a colony, you can fly new queens to different biomes and start afresh, experimenting with additional plant species that can be processed into new resources. There’s also an ecological factor to Microtopia, with your colony producing pollution that you can choose to mitigate or ignore.
The trailer, which you can view above, provides a brief overview of Microtopia’s elegant logic systems and motherboard-like factory structures, while there’s also a demo available for anyone who wants to take a closer look. The full game releases on February 18, which isn’t far away at all, although that pits it against some heavy-hitters like Avowed and Monster Hunter: Wilds.
At least it isn’t competing directly with other factory games, since all the bigger names in industrial automation opened for business last year. This included the excellent Satisfactory, which arrived in September 2024 after five years in Steam early access, while Factorio’s long in-gestation Space Age expansion blasted off a month later (blowing my tiny mind in the process). Time will tell whether Microtopia proves as involved or elaborate as those games, although the last few moments of the trailer imply your factories can have some scale to them.
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Kurt Indovina
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