I’ve said before that there’s a simulator for just about everything, and now, I can say that includes a beer brewing simulator. Beer Factory on Steam gives you the opportunity to manage a family beer factory.
Plot Ahoy!
The game opens with getting a call from your accountant informing you that you’ve been able to purchase the beer factory. However, there are some issues that need rectification before you can launch into production, including cleaning, renovations, and getting the utilities turned back on. There may also be some squatters in the factory as well as a machine abandoned in the condemned part of the factory. Right away, you can tell that you’ve got your work cut out for you going into this potentially doomed business venture.
From that start, you can expect pretty much everything you know from a PlayWay simulator.
Review Notes
So, let’s talk about this. I’ve reviewed simulators before, so a fair amount of the mechanics I’m going to discuss here are going to be familiar. That said, I’m not a fan of how Beer Factory opens. Within the first three minutes of gameplay, your actual task is to chuck items at the squatters to remove them, and when you succeed, you actually receive necessary brewing parts. If that kind of activity appeals to you, great, but it’s a bit of a strange note on which to begin.
Aside from that opening, then you go into more standard manufacturing simulator fare. You throw away trash, tidy up the space, and eventually begin unlocking new tools to help you accomplish your mandatory tasks. I hate to tell you this, dear reader, but you’ve got a significant amount of cleaning to do before you can even begin thinking about brewing beer. There’s a lot, and it’s honestly pretty tedious. Once your accountant comes back with subsidies for your factory, your next task is to build a factory extension, which requires finding the construction tab and then clicking on the machinery room, which I only identified as satisfying the condition because the image included “factory extension” scrawled on it.
Now, generally speaking, Beer Factory is supposed to act like any other manufacturing sim. You’ll manage your finances, manage your production line, import materials (in this case, grain), figure out storage, and work out the bottling assembly line. The actual beer brewing portion of the title is comparatively minimal. If that’s your interest, this is likely not going to be the game for you.
Visually, the graphics are decent, but some of the rendering leaves a bit to be desired. Your ever-returning squatter sometimes walks through the floor rather than on it, and when you sweep, a magical semicircular forcefield drives the dirt before you as though it expects to hear the lamentations of your women. The sound design is solid, if a bit repetitive.
That phrase also describes gameplay. In early stages, you will chuck bags of grain onto the grain crusher’s conveyor belt bag by bag. Obviously, as you move through the game, you will be able to automate various procedures, though not all, and acquire employees to perform these tasks for you. This is, admittedly, pretty par for the course for the simulator genre, and if there weren’t quite so many issues, I can see how these repetitive tasks would be kind of fun and relaxing to perform. However, Beer Factory needs some bug-fixing.
When I mention bugs, I don’t just mean the magical sinking floor. That’s visual but doesn’t affect gameplay. Things like the water truck breaking down or stairs vanishing and requiring reconstruction, however, do. In a lot of cases, these bugs require restarting, and that really detracts from the game experience.
TLDR
At $18.99 on Steam, Beer Factory feels a bit expensive for a title that isn’t quite ready to be called a full version. However, with some beefing up, Beer Factory could actually be a really solid simulator. It’s just not quite ready yet.
Stray Thoughts From Behind the Keyboard
- Can we talk about how the coffee maker already works before you fix the fuses?
- I kind of want to know who’s giving out subsidies for beer factories.
- I despise the forklift. Just so much.
- The pallets seem able to fall through the floor, so there’s that.
- This is not a beer factory simulator. This is a factory simulator in which the product happens to be beer. Sort of.
- I do think there’s room for Beer Factory to become a decent sim. The general ideas are there.