Parcel Game review
3

I suspect this just isn't my sort of game. So please take my rating with a big grain of salt if you enjoy Factorio style queue management.

Initially, this is a game about sorting mail -- with input from sources that provide mixed types of parcels, and you need to build a chain of sorters, routers, and mergers (with additional components such as customs checks for international parcels). Your job is to scale up so that you can handle faster levels of input with your infrastructure so that you can increase your income over time. And additional tasks present themselves as you meet various milestones.

This leads mostly into an ongoing optimization puzzle -- especially since your inputs and outputs are constrained by quickly ballooning costs and/or per-warehouse limits, but your internal infrastructure is cheaper to add. Fairly quickly, you acquire a second warehouse, but that just gives you the opportunity to rebuild the exact same setup you've already optimized in warehouse 1 -- unless you pick up Contracts, which ... just seem to be the exact same as regular inbound mail, except with different, preset ratios of content? But those also seem to be an optional part of the game since you can unlock Factories without ever touching them.

Factories... well, I can't review past that, because that's where I gave up. You pay about $10,000 to acquire your first building, and then you walk inside to learn that it does absolutely nothing until you pay another $25,000+ to acquire a supplier (there are four different supplier inputs and filling them out costs $200k+). Three of them are required to unlock retail, the next game level, but at that point the game wasn't engaging me. Possibly because it's outside my genre and I'm missing the hook, or possibly because it's expecting me to reinvent the wheel too often. (I'd have loved the ability to clone a warehouse setup, for example, rather than having to tediously rebuild it piece by piece.) I'd also suggest starting new factories with a supplier already unlocked, instead of giving you a surprise reveal that your huge investment is useless without another investment of over twice the size.

Regardless, dev, good luck with your game and I hope it finds its target audience.

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