Industria Spiel
Industria can be played in largely two folds: FPS shooter and walking simulator. The game jumps back and forth between the two, but ultimately it chooses not to emulsify them into one solid experience. As you are walking around in transcendental alternate dimensions, Nora, the protagonist, isn’t solving puzzles, nor interacting with the environment, nor shooting at robots. Its intermission is the epitome of walking simulator, where the protagonist can only observe the surroundings and interpret its dream-like meanings.
In the devastated city of Hakavik, you are fighting few varieties of robot army with 5 different weapons. And the weapon choices are as plain as: a pickaxe, a handgun, a shotgun, a SMG, and a rifle; a mundane choice for fine shooting. There are no other guns, no real inventory managements; these guns are just hardwired to your pockets with ammo capacity. Because the game lacks any haptic feedback or adaptive trigger supports, the half of combat experience, the offense, is simply old-fashioned.
Enemies themselves, possibly from rogue AI uprising, are not fully developed either. There are only few different types of enemies, much like the guns, and their attacks and designs are not at all unique. If anything, their behavior was simply off, possibly due to bad combat AI —the irony. They engage from a condition most players would call it hidden or roaming, once they lost sight of the player they disengage only after a few seconds. Combined with small variety of enemies and frequent abandoned industrial city theme, the combat becomes a repetitive chore.
The unique theme, albeit it is central to the game, doesn’t support the narrative. The game starts off from East Berlin, the night before the historic fall of the Berlin Wall, but the game could have started off from any parts of the world with secret government labs. The game then jumps to a robot infested city, but there are more hunks of junks —i.e. not moving— then the ones that do. Traveling to parallel universe or to another time line creates its own walking simulator moment between every chapters, but it holds no significant weight. The game practically jumps to a different scenery with every chance it has with little to no regard in stitching them together. If you were to expect the lighthouse moment from Bioshock Infinite, you will be swimming in it.
It is never a good sign when the synopsis of a game solely focuses on the prologue, and the epilogue doesn’t conclude the arc it was running. The sequel to the game is already announced, but as of now, the sequel will have to keep cooking what the predecessor had as most of them weren’t finished cooking. The game fundamentally doesn’t fully develop neither the shooter or the walking simulator.
Conclusion: First Chapter of Industria Franchise?
We don’t get full version of anything in Industria. As a first person shoot’em up, its combat and play style are mostly archaic. As a walking simulator, the game finishes off without actually developing further into what could have been. It is usually a symptom of a larger problem, and in this particular case, it appears the game was developed with the sequel already in mind.