Krystals with A K

2/10

A shapez clone that feels like an early prototype, a proof of concept of what the game could be after a few years of development.

What is it? A large scale factory automation in which you use drills, conveyor belts, and different machinery to turn crystals (with a k) into stuff. If you’ve played shapez or Factorio, you know what this is trying to be. Unfortunately, this looks and plays like a half-baked prototype trying to copy shapez without any of the things that make that one fun to play. The UI looks like a quickly done mock-up, there are no goals, no achievements, no plan to follow guiding you in your factory building. You just get a few prompts at the start explaining that you can pan and zoom, draw and erase.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3359922171

As you collect crystals, new items unlock, and clicking on one shows a little help text describing what it does and a little screenshot of how to use it. You can place these items on the map to make new things, which make new things, which make new things. That’s it. You make things to make things. Starting with the basic red/blue/yellow crystals, you can combine them into purple/green/orange/black, which you can then turn into chips, then more advanced factory parts and power cores, then yet more advanced factory parts and… drumroll please… a Monument, as a testament to your glory. Congratulations, you turned a huge bunch of crystals into a monument. Plus, the game keeps crashing.

Not only is the game not providing incentives to do stuff other than getting to do more stuff, but it also keeps you having to constantly redraw your factory because the crystal mines don’t last forever, on the contrary, they run out pretty fast. You build a nice workflow, and a few minutes later it all stops working because one of the drills ran out of crystals, which makes the whole giant workflow halt because now the forge can’t work without one of the inputs, which stops the engraver, which stops another thing, and now you have to find another source of blue crystals, which might be in a different area, so now you have to redraw the whole thing because you need to draw a path from the other side of the room. Or worse, the drill doesn’t run out of crystals, but drills a different kind of crystal, because you don’t have nicely separated islands of the same type, you have hidden layers upon layers, so while you built a workflow assuming that blue comes from this drill, now it suddenly brings red, and you have to debug the whole workflow and figure out why you’re not getting black crystals into this engraver anymore. You can’t just build something and let it run, you have to always keep micromanaging it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3359922084

Building items requires crystals, but every new instance of that item requires more crystals, so while the first drill costs 5 blue crystals, the second one takes 10, the third one 15, and so on, so by the time you need to place your 20th drill, you have to wait a really long time to get enough blue crystals to make a new drill. And the items in the second stage require not only pure crystals, but packs of crystals, so a lot more waiting in order to be able to do things. Second stage is a lot like the first stage, except that there’s a lot more waiting, all for items that really aren’t that useful.

The third stage is where things get more interesting, because instead of drilling, you can just continuously make crystals out of thin air, so the micromanaging part is over. You also get teleporters, so no need to draw convoluted pathways to get things from where they’re being mined to the right assembly machine. Unfortunately, this is also the part that’s the end, so now you’re just playing “for fun”, except that there’s little fun and no rewards, other than your own self esteem for having built a neat and compact factory that makes things out of nothing.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3360697767

How much of an early draft is this game? It has no app icon, the app is called “Terra”, on the default window size it starts at the item description doesn’t fit, and if you increase the window size it stretches weirdly, if you increase the window size a lot more the factory doesn’t render except for a rectangle in the middle (this is barely playable both on the Steam Deck’s small screen and on a 4k screen), there’s no cloud saving and no achievements, there are no in-game goals other than just making stuff, no challenging builds like shapez’ intricate patterns, the game keeps crashing (luckily it autosaves quite often), the graphics look like they’re done in MS Paint by someone with barely any artistic skills, the whole UI is unintuitive, there are almost no keyboard controls, there’s a developer god-mode left in that’s easy to discover, and oh so many other wrong things.

Should anybody play this? No, just buy shapez instead. If you played that one to the limit, still don’t buy this, get shapez 2 instead.

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Krystals with A K is a factory/building game along the lines of Factorio or Satisfactory, but with a much worse technical implementation and extremely poor presentation. The game seems closest to being a direct ripoff of Shapes.io, perhaps hoping gamers might be confused into buying this instead of the arguably superior Shapes game. Gameplay consists of laying out conveyor belts to harvest materials, then spending what you harvest on more sophisticated components until you have a nice, complicated factory set up. Other games have done it better.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window.

The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Godot 2D game engine/toolset. The 2D component for Godot is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.

Krystals with A K has the gamer gouging price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. If this is the kind of game you want to play, just stick with Factorio or Satisfactory where there aren't as many cut corners.

This game is addictive, it looks simple but there is so much to it.