Well, it finally happened. After carving out a niche in the market by making puzzle games that were secretly about programming, it was inevitable that Zachtronics would eventually cross a line and make a puzzle game that was actually about programming.

What’s surprising about this, though, is what a mistake it’s turned out to be. Previous Zachtronics games such as SpaceChem or Infinifactory might have been heavily based around programming concepts, with easy in-game analogues you could point to for things like functions and arithmetic operations, but by packaging them up as an assembly line that built molecules/fully kitted-out living rooms instead of writing lines of code they were successfully insulated from real-world programming in a way that allowed the puzzles to co-exist quite peacefully with the much broader programming elements. Shenzhen I/O is different. Shenzhen takes the SpaceChem system of connecting together individual components that each do a segment of processing to gradually build a desired output, but instead of a pair of waldos manipulating atoms and molecules Shenzhen has you writing actual, literal computer code. And not just any code, either; Shenzhen’s pseudo-language is styled after assembly programming, which is a notoriously finicky language where nothing is handed to you on a plate and you have to do absolutely everything. Almost nobody programs in assembler any more since this is the 21st century and we have a whole host of nicely interpreted languages that trade off some efficiency¹ for minor quality-of-life features such as “being able to run on more than one architecture” and “not driving the people who have to write in it completely batshit loco”.

So not only are you writing your pseudocode in a fake language that requires you to be absolutely explicit about every instruction, but Shenzhen then saddles you with further restrictions via the components you use. There are several different types, but what dismayed me a little bit is how little opportunity Shenzhen provided to use interesting bits and pieces like the RAM/ROM modules, instead preferring to have 95% of its puzzles require only the two core microprocessor components – these are the standard blocks with a series of inputs and outputs and a space in the middle into which you can insert lines of code.  There’s a small processor that takes up to 9 lines of code and can store one variable, and a large processor that can accommodate a whopping 14 lines of code and two whole variables (although you can only do arithmetic operations on one of them). And while the assembler pseudo-language has a fair degree of functionality (loops, conditionals, execute once markers) this is still not a lot of space to work with, to put it mildly.

What Shenzhen is trying to do here is create puzzles out of the conflict between writing code in pseudo-assembler, where you have to be very explicit and long-winded about operations that could easily be done in a single line in a better language, and the limited space available in each processor component, which require that you fight for every single spare line of code and refactor repeatedly until your program is as pithy as it possibly can be. To begin with it works quite well — as long as you don’t mind writing programs in assembler, that is. Each of Shenzhen’s puzzles gives you one or more input source that spits out integers between -999 and 999, either as a constant steady signal that can be read at any time or as a more discrete series of packet values that must be individually (and explicitly) shunted between components. Said integers are supposed to represent the input state of some real-world device that you’re supposed to be designing — a card key operated door lock, or a smart rangefinder for a firearm — and you’re supposed to take that input and generate a set of integer outputs that matches the desired behaviour of the device, such as unlocking a door (or not).

The inputs and corresponding target outputs are helpfully displayed along the bottom of the design interface, and each device has set of test cases that are supposed to cover off most of the use cases that device would typically encounter; you can’t complete the puzzle until you come up with a program that can successfully pass all test cases. At the start of the game, when the devices you’re building are still relatively simple, it’s a decent enough system; you’re given sufficient space to experiment and refine your code, building a program that would qualify as “good” by basic programming standards and which covers off all required use cases and — this is important — all additional edge cases that you can think of. Shenzhen does the usual Zachtronics thing of showing you a histogram of how other people’s solutions performed after you complete each puzzle, but I know that to score highly on those usually requires you to break with the programming paradigm and build a solution optimised to work only according to the game-y rules of the puzzle rather than in a broader programming context. I was happy to trade lines of code or run cycles for having a robust piece of code that I knew would work without even having to look past the first screen’s worth of test cases — because that’s how programming is supposed to work. You have test cases to make sure somebody unfamiliar with the code doesn’t break it, but they’re not there to define the overall viability of the product the way Shenzhen’s are.

Unfortunately as I got further and further through Shenzhen’s list of 30-odd puzzles I became increasingly dismayed. For one thing, Shenzhen is singularly uninterested in teaching you how to play it. Zach seems to be rather taken with the concept of not having an in-game tutorial or puzzles that largely serve to introduce the player to new game mechanics, but instead putting all of the information required to play the game (including specifications for some of the more complicated puzzles) into a PDF manual that you’re expected to refer to as you play it. I cannot overstate how utterly infuriating this is – Shenzhen is not a simple game, and as with real-life programming you will constantly find yourself looking up how specific instructions work. Unlike real-life programming, however you can’t just go and find the answer on Stack Overflow; instead you’ve got to alt-tab out of the game, scroll through this PDF looking for the relevant page (which is always just a bland statement of what a command does, with precious few working examples), bring the game back up, write the command into your code, find it doesn’t work, alt-tab again to reread the documentation to see what you got wrong, maximise the game again…  Zachtronics released a similar assembly programming game called TIS-100 a year or two back that had the same conceit of a PDF manual, except there you were supposed to be dealing with a salvaged computer from the 1980s so it made a certain amount of narrative sense. Shenzhen on the other hand is supposed to be set in the 2030s so it’s absolutely nonsensical to be referring to what’s supposedly a paper manual the whole time; it’s a huge step back from Infinifactory’s elegant pictograms that depicted the use of new puzzle components, and probably the number one obstacle in the way of enjoying a game that’s already got a stupidly high barrier to entry².

Once I’d smashed my way through the manual and learned this stupid pseudo-assembly language, though, a more philosophical problem reared its head: the early puzzles give you enough breathing room to write good code, but the later puzzles enforce so many restrictions that you’re practically forced to write bad code that’s enough to pass the specific test cases you’re presented with and no more. SpaceChem and Infinifactory had similarly restrictive scenarios, but by setting themselves one step away from programming they insulated themselves from the inherent requirement a good program has to be written in such a way that it covers off all the foreseeable edge cases, and so building a kludge solution in Infinifactory was far less painful than it is in Shenzhen, where some of the endgame puzzles demand that you perpetrate some outrageous hacks that wouldn’t last thirty seconds in the real world. I’ve always lauded Zachtronics games for their stealth educational potential, but Shenzhen gets it horribly wrong; where SpaceChem and Infinifactory taught you about the broad concepts behind programming, Shenzhen is teaching you to actually program – badly.

Of course, I could be getting things horribly wrong – maybe it’s not that the game forces me to write bad code, but that I’m simply not very good at code in the first place. I’d have two counterarguments to this, though. First, my day job involves a lot of coding (albeit not in assembler, which is maybe where I’ve been going wrong all these years) and as I haven’t been fired yet I can only assume that I’m not completely terrible at it. Second, if that is the case then it’s effectively restricting Shenzhen’s playerbase to people who have completed a Computer Science degree and makes the game bad by default, as you simply can’t assume that level of pre-existing knowledge on the part of the player.

Still, if I have so many problems with the game, then why does my Steam account show 26 hours played for Shenzhen I/O? The answer is very simple: most of that wasn’t spent in the assembly programming portion of the game, but instead in the fiendishly addictive Solitaire minigame attached to it – it’s so addictive, in fact, that when I booted the game up to get some screenshots just now I ended up playing another 15 rounds. I’d almost say it’s worth buying Shenzhen just for the solitaire – fortunately for you, you don’t have to as it’s since been packaged as a standalone game. That’s unfortunate for Shenzhen, however, as without the solitaire I can’t really recommend it to anyone who hasn’t already bought it; while many of the puzzle concepts display the trademark Zachtronics creativity it has none of the relative accessibility of previous Zachtronics titles (which is weird since it strikes me as an attempt to polish up TIS-100 and release it to a wider audience that doesn’t do anything to actually widen the audience) and none of the edutainment potential, reducing it to a bog-standard puzzle game with a ridiculous barrier to entry. Definitely the worst Zachtronics game I’ve played so far.

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It feels somewhat dismissive to call Infinifactory “SpaceChem – but in 3D!”, but that’s exactly what it is – indeed, that’s exactly what it’s marketed as in the Steam blurb:

LIKE SPACECHEM… IN 3D! Design and run factories in a first-person, fully 3D environment.

In fairness to Zachtronics they did make SpaceChem, and so in describing their third mass-market game this way they’ve just saved me a whole lot of bother trying to sum up what Infinifactory is about. It’s SpaceChem. But in 3D.

What’s that? You didn’t play SpaceChem? Well, in that case my advice would be for you to crawl out from the rock you’ve been living under for the past five years, go to Steam, and buy it right the fuck now, since it’s the best puzzle game I’ve played in the last decade. If you want a little more information before you do that, I’ll grudgingly oblige, though: SpaceChem is a game where you take a series of inputs — in SpaceChem’s case a variety of molecules — and use a pair of manipulators on a 2D grid to weld them together into bigger and more complex molecules. The manipulators can be given simple instructions – grab, drop, rotate, pause and so on — and the key to the game is to synchronise your manipulators with careful timing to achieve the desired output.

Infinifactory is that. But in 3D.

Oh okay, there are some important differences that go beyond the additional dimension. Every puzzle in Infinifactory has you taking a set inputs and manipulating them to form a desired output, just like in SpaceChem. In Infinifactory the inputs take the form of (at the start of the game) a selection of one or more blocks that have to be stuck together into a certain configuration, or (later on) some big pre-built construction that has to be rebuilt into something new. To do this you have at your disposal a selection of factory blocks, starting with a basic conveyor belt and progressing through to welders, sensors, pusher blocks, rotator blocks and more. You have an unlimited number of these blocks — which are perfectly happy floating in midair as long as there’s at least one block in the construction anchored to the ground — as well as the ability to fly anywhere in the level via jetpack, so the factory you can build is limited only by the selection of blocks you’ve unlocked and the total amount of space available in the level.

And your imagination, of course.

This is a fair bit more freedom than SpaceChem gave you. In SpaceChem you were slaved to that 2D grid which made transportation of the larger molecules downright hellish in places. Infinifactory is positively roomy by comparison – I’m 12 hours in and about two thirds of the way through the campaigns, and I’ve only just come across a level where I had to stretch to squeeze everything in. Infinifactory’s challenge instead lies in the design of individual mechanisms rather than the construction of an entire system; each level starts with you taking a look at the input and ouput and mapping out a series of tasks that have to be done to make one match the other, and then building a series of mechanisms that will accomplish these tasks. Like all the best puzzle games Infinifactory never holds your hand beyond a few infographics to demonstrate the functioning of new blocks, but it is quite good at ramping up the complexity of its puzzles — and its mechanisms — in such a way that you quickly and naturally establish a basic toolbox for doing tasks you encounter again and again, like counting out a specific number of a certain block before pushing it on to the next stage of the factory. The move to 3D confers a lot more flexibility in what you can build and so there’s usually a little tweaking of the design involved to make it better fit the specific circumstance you’re using it in, but probably 70-80% of each level is built using mechanisms and ideas you’ve used in previous puzzles.

The key part, of course — and the part that makes both SpaceChem and Infinifactory such good puzzlers — is that 20% you haven’t come across before. This is the part that causes you to scratch your head and experiment, because it’s rare that the solution is immediately obvious or that the first thing you try will work. Sometimes you’ll come up with a good, compact solution that becomes part of your toolbox, and sometimes you’ll build some horrifyingly inefficient agglomeration of sensors, conduits and pusher blocks that makes you feel ashamed to be playing this game, but you’ll always feel quite smart when you successfully solve a level. I think this is the crucial thing that makes these games work: they’re complicated games, but you’re never placed in a situation where you don’t have a clue where to start. Thanks to that previous experience you can always build at least part of the system, and once you’ve done that you can usually nail the rest of it through a little bit of trial and error.

Now, if there are any programmers reading this the above approach to solving these particular problems might sound a little bit familiar, and that’s because both SpaceChem and Infinifactory’s basic setup bears more than a passing resemblance to basic programming functions. My experience is mostly with Python, where you make functions that take a number of inputs and return one or more outputs, and that’s exactly how Infinifactory works: it’s a series of these compact input-output functions chained together to achieve a specific goal. It’s even got some basic logic in it as the sensor blocks work kind of the same way as an IF statement, and later on you can use them with blockers for the equivalent of IF NOT.  Just like programming you’ll remember particularly good solutions when you come across the same problem later, and just like programming you’ll occasionally hare off down the wrong path for twenty minutes and end up building something awful that you push through to the end because you’re committed now, but thankfully you don’t have to live with your mistakes for longer than it takes to complete the level.

So Infinifactory has much of the same catnip appeal that programming does – except because it’s dressed up as a game it’s far more palatable to non-programmers (I was addicted to SpaceChem before I’d ever coded a single word of Python, after all). The idea translates remarkably well to 3D, too; I don’t think Infinifactory makes quite as much use of the third dimension as it really should, especially since you don’t unlock the lifter block that lets you move blocks vertically until about halfway through the game, but the Minecraft-style building and block placement feels easy and natural. It does have its downsides – in particular the undo and redo functions are laggy and unusable, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way to move blocks en masse, meaning that if you realise your mechanism is one block to the left of where it should be you have to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch in the new spot — but it works really well, and it’s a damn sight more attractive than SpaceChem.

Is Infinifactory a better game than SpaceChem, though? That’s a difficult call to make, as while they’re built around the same core concept they each have a very different focus. SpaceChem had the advantage that you were chaining together multiple factories into a larger machine that you could control, like the level with the laser that you had to fuel and shoot to explode incoming asteroids. I’m over halfway through Infinifactory, and while there are still one or two blocks left to unlock I haven’t come across anything that’ll let me control my factories while they’re running. As soon as you push the ON switch it runs completely hands-off without any intervention from you. This removes the balancing crutches you could build into some of SpaceChem’s puzzles, but I think Infinifactory does lose something important for not having that kind of interaction; it’s strictly about matching the outputs and nothing else. On the other hand it is nice to be building actual things – missiles, computer terminals, fully-furnished apartments¹ — rather than byzantine collections of molecules, and it is a bit more satisfying to see the blocks make their way around your conveyor layout in glorious 3D. That goes double in the woefully-few levels where you’re compelled to make effective use of the vertical plane.

Ultimately, though, I think what Infinifactory loses in terms of interaction it makes up for in imagination. Some of the stuff you build is truly barmy, and some of it literally makes you laugh out loud when you see what you have to make. It’s got a perfectly-pitched difficulty curve, with level design that’s great at constantly changing things up and keeping you interested while providing a consistently challenging selection of puzzles. Because this is a Zachtronics game there’s the usual cryptic backstory delivered mostly through audiologs purloined from dead bodies, but it’s never worse than inoffensive and actually gets quite engaging towards the end.  Besides underusing the three-dimensionality of the new environment Infinifactory barely puts a step wrong; the design, presentation and audio are top-notch all the way through. It may or may not be better than SpaceChem depending on your personal taste, but it’s definitely something you’ll find inhabiting the same lofty heights of the genre.

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Ironclad Tactics suffers from something of an expectations problem. It’s the next original game from Zachtronics Industries, whose previous game you should have heard of if you care about puzzle games at all: SpaceChem. I loved SpaceChem; it was an immensely clever piece of work and the only game I’ve ever played that’s made me think so hard I’ve given myself a headache. Moreover, its presentation and soundtrack managed to evoke an omnipresent feeling of “Science is awesome!” despite SpaceChem itself having very little to do with actual science, and that’s always going to score bonus points on a site called The Scientific Gamer. Following up one of the few games I would actually genuinely describe as inspired was always going to be tricky, and Ironclad Tactics falls intro the trap I half-suspected it would: it commits the (forgivable) sin of merely being okay. For most games, this would be enough. For something which is inevitably going to be compared to SpaceChem, however, “okay” falls some way short of the lofty standard set by its predecessor.

For me, then, playing Ironclad Tactics resulted in an inescapable sense of disappointment which I’m not sure I can divorce from any objective quality the game may or may not have, and which is going to colour this review a little bit. This probably isn’t all that fair. Ironclad Tactics might not be SpaceChem, but it’s not trying to be.  Instead it reaches back to Zachtronics’ earlier Bureau of Steam Engineering for thematic inspiration around which to base a sort of deck-building card game set in an alternate version of the American Civil War fought with giant steam-powered robots. You build a deck of twenty cards from whatever you have available, with the cards being anything from Ironclads themselves to their armament to supporting infantry units to special tactics and maneuver cards that can turn a battle in your favour when played at the right moment. This deck is then used in an adversarial matchup with another player – either a campaign AI or an actual human being – which is played out on a narrow 5×10 game board. Stuff you deploy goes down on the left hand side of the board, and your objective is to move it all the way to your opponent’s side of the board in order to score victory points. Get enough victory points and you win.

So far, so boardgamey, right? This isn’t something you’d particularly need a computer in order to simulate, but where Ironclad Tactics starts getting complex is with its turn timer and action point gathering system. The turn timer is completely automated and cannot be stopped, which is probably the key concept of Ironclad Tactics and which adds a time pressure element that goes hand in hand with your complete inability to affect anything that happens on the game board without playing a card. You can order your units to pause where they are, or tell a paused unit to start moving again, but everything else is either automated – there are no attack orders in Ironclad Tactics, with Ironclads and infantry automatically attacking the first enemy unit in range – or requires you to spend some of your precious action points to play a card in order to change the battlefield to your advantage.

This is complicated further by the random way in which your cards are dealt to you: there’s a track of five cards at the bottom of the screen, and every turn the rightmost one shuffles off of the end of the track to be replaced by a new card drawn from your deck.  You have no way of affecting the draw order or draw rate, and so you have no way of guaranteeing what’s going to be available to use at any one time. Here we come across the first of my actual genuine problems with Ironclad Tactics (i.e. one which doesn’t stem from the whole “It’s not SpaceChem” thing): it is the first deck-building game I have come across that doesn’t let you affect the draw in some way. This utterly cripples what’s possible in terms of actual tactics and places you firmly at the mercy of the random number generator; you might want one of the four Maneuver cards you put in your deck in order to get one of your units to change lanes, but if the game doesn’t feel like dealing one to you you’re stuffed. You can’t keep one in your hand for a rainy day because cards are constantly dropping off the end of the track, and you can’t try to draw more cards from your deck. Instead you just have to sit there and hope one turns up. And if you were thinking that maybe you could just build the deck in order to maximise the odds of a Maneuver card being available I have some rather bad news: there’s a hard cap of four cards of each type allowed in any single deck.

This makes Ironclad Tactics a deck-building game where the deck-building has been intentionally crippled in order to accentuate the random element of the game. Perhaps if that’s what floats your boat you’ll get on slightly better with it than I did; speaking personally, though, this drove me up the wall. Several times I lost a campaign game because of the draw, immediately restarted with the exact same deck and won a ridiculously lopsided victory because the RNG gods had decided to stop fucking me over and finally gave me the cards I needed. It’s an error which is compounded by the bizarre way in which new cards are spoon-fed to you over time for completing various special objectives,  or – even worse – must be acquired by using older, shittier cards a certain number of times, which has the effect of massively restricting what is possible in terms of deck composition and tactics until you’ve played the game for an hour or two. Once you have a decent set of cards unlocked you can actually start to build a deck to suit your personal preferences and tactics (that is, if the RNG will actually give the right cards to you), but until that moment comes Ironclad Tactics comes across as a startlingly braindead experience.

Then there’s the question of theme. As game concepts go I am reasonably certain this is one of a kind, so I certainly can’t fault Ironclad for unoriginality or lack of imagination. At the same time, though, I’m sure giant steam-powered robots shouldn’t leave me this cold. It’s undeniable that a lot of thought has gone into the game design of Ironclad Tactics, but it seems to share a critical flaw with a lot of European-style board games in that their mechanical design often has sod-all to do with their actual theme. So it goes with the eponymous Ironclads; you could replace them with tanks, rhinoceroses or the giant rock from Rock Of Ages and what you’d end up with would still be functionally the same game. Where SpaceChem played well to its sciencey theme even though it wasn’t scientific at all, Ironclad Tactics fails to connect with its steampunk stylings in any but the most superficial of manners.

I suspect this is because Ironclad Tactics has been designed first and foremost as an adversarial game that can be played against other human beings. When you do this purity of design tends to be at the forefront of your mind in order to keep things fair and balanced for both players, and if that comes at the expense of the flavour you just have to trust that the mechanics will be sufficiently compelling that the players won’t care. Unfortunately this means Ironclad Tactics runs into two problems. One is that I think it’s too RNG-dependent to be much of a long-term multiplayer prospect, and so gearing the entire thing towards multiplayer may have been a bit premature. The other is that this has come at the expense of what Zachtronics is known to excel at: brain-taxing single-player puzzle scenarios. It’s true that there’s a couple of campaign levels that do provide for this, but in general the whole thing is rather too sterile to be anywhere near as satisfying as I think it could have been.

Most telling of all is that this is the first game Zachtronics has developed that’s really been able to indulge itself in terms of production values, and yet the “simple” flash game I linked earlier in the review does a far better job of playing to the steam-powered giant robot theme than Ironclad Tactics does with its hands-off gameplay and comic-book storyline. It’s arguable that I’m not playing Ironclad Tactics in the way it’s supposed to be played, and that I was looking for something completely different that Ironclad Tactics definitively is not. Even if that’s true, though, I still think it’s a severely flawed game that didn’t show a single flash of brilliance in the several hours I spent with it. And when you consider where it’s come from, well, it’s hard not to be disappointed with that outcome. I didn’t start this review particularly badly disposed towards Ironclad Tactics, but the more I think about it the more I’d have to say it’s not even a game you should buy when cheap; it’s never more than mediocre and can occasionally be immensely frustrating, and you can’t even get any enjoyment out of the giant robots. Even Pacific Rim got that right, for crying out loud.

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