Epic Inventor

Strengths

• • Great fun

  • Great look, despite simple / minimal graphics

  • Clean UI

  • Great blend of base building, RTS, RPG and crafting genres

  • When you first get spring boots, it's amazing. When you first the propeller and can fly, it's super-amazing.

  • Factories deliver straight into your inventory (no need to visit the places like with The Blockheads)

Weaknesses

• • Missing mini-map (until locators at later levels)

  • If have all the necessary components for item, shouldn't have to manually craft the intermediate steps

  • Having to harvest farms

  • Get “base under attack” messages, but don't know where

  • Enemies spawn in your base – there should be minimum distance

  • Much of the dungeon level is under-populated: no mobs; no resources

  • Enemy unit AI is poor: they don't path find, but rather go to the nearest point above or below the player

  • Not full-screen

  • Procedural generation needs playability checking: for example, when I first played, the first entrance to the dungeon was too wide for me to jump, so I could only go into the dungeon. This resulted in me not accessing the easy resources on the surface level, and hence giving up.

  • It would be nice of the dungeon level was procedurally generated rather than tiled, as it gets repeticious

  • From time to time I wanted to be able to mine the dirt, but I respect the design decision that this isn't a feature of EI

  • Not enough base defence placeables for my liking

  • Can be quite difficult to explore the crafting tree from within game (tended to refer to the Crafting Database

  • Some info is not available in-game in advance of building / placement, such as placeable sizes, power consumption, power production

  • Resource extraction timers can become annoying after a while (particularly given that not all resources, e.g. webs, can be mined or farmed). A possible solution would be to reduce the timers on the basic resources with the players level.

Sizes

Mines: 6

Crate: 4

Box: 2

Workbench: 4

Thorn Trap: 3

Forge: 4

Windmill: 8

Large farm: 6

Small safe: 3

Medium safe: 4

Large safe: 5

Sawmill: 5