Bullet Factory

One morning, the scrap in the Great Junkyard started to walk. The rust heaps grew legs, pincers and an appetite for anything shiny. One factory is still standing east of the junkyard: Granny Odette's. She's 87, and she just left it to you: "I'm retiring, not hanging up my helmet." She's still on the radio, to give advice, or at least to comment.

The plan is simple: turn the scrap into bullets before the scrap turns you into scrap.

It starts with a press that makes bullets and a belt that carries them to the wall. At the end, a turret fires whatever it gets. In between, you decide: every machine a bullet goes through changes it. An accelerator, a fire infuser, an explosive warhead, a seeker head, a prism that splits them…

Every bullet wears its recipe. Its body, nose, fins and flames change with the modules it went through, and the most elaborate ones become rare, epic or legendary, with a name of their own. But nothing is free: each pass through a booster costs half of the impact damage. One very special bullet, or lots of plain ones? The answer changes from sector to sector.

Across five sectors, your factory goes from rusty nails to laser beams: planks and nails, steam, electricity, chemistry, then the future. Each age changes the look of your machines and brings its own puzzles.

You run cables from the power plants to the machines, and an overloaded grid plunges the whole workshop into darkness. You pump water through pipes to feed the boilers, spin turbines, and cool down the big machines before they overheat. The largest buildings take up several tiles, so you also need room: buy land to the west, one plot at a time.

The game alternates two moments. During the work phase you build, repair and send drones to collect scrap on the discovered land. During the defence phase the Rusties arrive, and the factory has to hold.

Not all Rusties come the same way. Some rush in, some carry shields, split in two when they die or heal their friends. Spitters and Gunners stop out of reach of short-range turrets and shell your wall. Elites come with a speciality and waves with modifiers. Burns, frost, poison and electricity show right on the enemies' scrap hides. And when things get too hot, you can always click a monster to give it a good whack by hand, a skill you can upgrade too.

Each sector ends with a boss: the Armored Crusher, the Swarm Chief, the Mirror Automaton that sends your shots back, the Unstable Boiler, and finally the Giant Industrial Inspector, who never approved Odette's factory and is coming to shut it down for non-compliance.

Recovered blueprints unlock more than fifty buildings in the research tree: eleven turrets, nineteen modules, faster belts, power plants and reactors. The medals of honour handed out by Granny Odette open the upgrade tree, and optional contracts reward players who like to play with one hand behind their back.

As for Granny Odette, she comments on everything. She explains each new thing right when it shows up, with no endless tutorial, and with more humour than patience.