Developer Lohika Games is bringing the puzzling madness of Machineers from the mobile world into the PC arena and we have spent a couple days trying figuring out the method to their madness. Is the game worthy of your cash and disk space? Read on to find out.
Not all video games are created with monetary compensation in mind. Machineers was created as a design experiment for a Master thesis project at the IT University Copenhagen (download the actual thesis here). The purpose was to determine optimal design principles for creating educational games that appeal to children and educate beyond classic drill-and-practice: by experiential learning.
Machineers is a construction puzzle game with quirky robots and impressive machines. It is your job to repair broken objects and build your own mechanical inventions using gears, belts, cables and plenty of other tools. You play as Zola and are tasked with helping out the town folks by repairing their machines, such as the DJ machine, a coin-operated crane, and a mechanical arcade machine. The machines are repaired while using a point-and-click style of play, while employing a trial-and-error type of system, to reassemble a working mechanism.
The puzzles start out simple enough to easily introduce you to the concept, but become much more mind boggling as you progress through the first two available episodes. Available devices are located on a tab on the left and are in limited supply. We were able to solve some puzzles with a few items left so it’s not always necessary need to use up everything allotted you to solve a given puzzle. There are currently twelve puzzles per episode, with two episodes released, for a total of twenty four puzzles. This was enough to keep us busy for hours, and at €4.99/$4.99 per episode, that’s not a bad investment.
The graphics for the game are sharp, well detailed, well designed, and Machineers is an all around great looking game. The levels are pretty basic, with simple navigation, but the puzzles themselves are pretty fun to mess around with and range from easy to mind boggling.
Developer Lohika Games has taken a great concept and turned it into a fun and challenging game that can not only introduce you to the concepts of programming, but also entertain you for hours. For its low price and small download, this is a game that is worth its price.
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