Industry Review – German Half-Life

Industria is one of those “incredibly beautiful” indie first-person shooters that you’d think a showcase couldn’t be made by a small independent studio. In this case, it was the German team of two people who coped with this task, also thanks to the reasonable brevity of the game. Although the game has its own creative and technical issues, I definitely came out of it with the feeling that I would like a bonus.

• Platform: PC
• Publication date: 30. 9. 2021
• Producer: Blickmill (Germany)
• Genre: FPS
• Czech location: Not
• Multiplayer: Not
• Data to download: 15 GB
• Game time: 3+ hours
• Price: 513 CZK (couples)

Strengths

The opening of the game breathes on you in a familiar way if you’ve lived through the 1980s. You find yourself in Berlin at night during the fall of the Berlin Wall, but while other people on the streets have very different concerns, you, as a young woman, go to your workplace, a top-secret research institute, where state security is already destroying the evidence of a mysterious project. Your goal is to find Walter’s colleague, but he seems to have gone into a parallel dimension with the help of local devices – so where do you go after him.

You will find yourself in an alternative version of Berlin, which is markedly dominated by strange machines and tangles of giant cables and barricades. If City 17 from Half-Life 2 immediately reminds you of this, you won’t be alone. But this city is almost completely empty, except for one mysterious foreigner and a gradually awakening army of variously dangerous robots. In your search for Walter, you will gradually collect more and more powerful weapons of the classic type (pistol, machine gun, sniper) and face increasingly aggressive groups of mechanical enemies.

You will find yourself in an alternative version of Berlin.

Moving to different parts of the city is accompanied by short trips to the mysterious “black-and-white library and theater”, where on stage you become a witness to strange symbolic performances that, for a change, will remind you of scenes from David Lynch films. Together with a handful of dialogues and pre-arranged scenes, they complete a mosaic of deliberately mysterious stories, the climax of which, unfortunately, is no less strange. However, there are memorable moments in the game, shaped, rather than scripted, by the ingenious architecture of the environment and the contrasts between the robot-infested city center, the edge wall, or the forgotten church deep in the woods outside the city.

Weak sides

Although I clearly liked the world and the story of the game, despite its temporary strangeness, the gameplay was more difficult. The basic mechanics of movement or combat work well, and the first steps in the darkened mysterious city created an atmosphere that is no worse than last year’s Paradise Lost game from its Polish neighbors. But as soon as I got out of the dungeon and interiors to open streets, certain technical problems began to appear, the worst of which was the poor optimization of one of the most extensive locations in the game, where the graphics settings obviously had to be changed to make the game work. I then registered a similar issue during one of the final battles where the enemies seemed to spawn indefinitely, which is the most hated mechanic in shooters.

Partial driver support also left me with mixed feelings, for which I was grateful, but I was annoyed by the need to combine some functions with the keyboard. What I’m definitely not going to blame the game for is about three hours long, because in my opinion the price tag as well as the aesthetic quality of the game is what generates most of the experience as a result. If you love Half-Life and enjoy playing quirky indie games, you can definitely recommend Industrie. The two-man team was visibly impressed with their debut. However, if you’re looking for something similar but more extensive and well-tuned, I highly recommend the very similar Generation Zero game that you can also play with your friends.