Little Big Workshop Review (PS4)

Have you ever wondered what life the elves working for Santa might have? Little Big Workshop answers that curiosity to some degree if you picture Santa as a capitalistic business owner, the workshop as an imaginary factory on a messy worktable, and the toys as different mass-market products made to order. If you like tycoon like games read on to find out if there is a business to be made here, or if you should look for a deal elsewhere.

The pull of business simulation games is undeniable no matter if you have to become a railroad tycoon, the manager of a golf course, the architect behind a theme park, the virtual mayor of a city, the restauranteur behind a successful fast-food chain, or the master of life and death in a wacky hospital. Now the list of possible career choices is enriched by the factory owner, Little Big Workshop promising to offer the very same tycoon experience that turns serious business into cartloads of fun.

The start is quite simple and humble: in the middle of a chaotic worktable, covered in engineering paper you are given three small rooms with a couple of employees and the task to fulfill manufacturing orders from various clients. Your task sounds straightforward enough: grow your business from producing garden gnomes into a manufacturing empire by conquering the woodworking, metallurgy, plastic materials casting industries, and even working for secret government agencies.

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But the road to success is bumpier than it looks. First of all, you will have to manage efficiently the space you are given, by creating storage and manufacturing areas, but also a resting space for your ever-growing number of employees. Your first shy steps are made in quite a limited environment, but after completing the first orders and finishing the tutorial you will be rewarded by a growing number of options regarding expansion and development. Soon you will replace manual manufacturing with automatized production lines, you will hire more and more workers, build new working spaces as you will have access to more and more technologies.

In order to finance all this growth, you will have to take on orders from your clients that are rewarded on completion with money and XP. The first resource is important to keep your business going, while the process of leveling up opens the way to more advanced production options. In order to maximize your relationship with your clients and grow into a successful business, you will have to complete a series of challenges that grow harder and harder. There is also the open market that does not offer XP, but it often beacons you with limited time contracts that can help you rake in a serious amount of cash.

As you branch out in different production sectors it will be extremely important to expand your factory floor and specialize your workforce so they can manufacture efficiently the evermore complex designs. The entire process starts with the blueprint, which allows you to choose from different raw materials and assign the manufacturing steps to different workstations.

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The custom orders from your loyal clients will require a set of criteria to be met regarding the costs, the quality, and the time needed to produce the different items. You will soon go from production times that are only a few days to orders that can take up to a month to manufacture. That is why it is important to always keep an eye on your finances, in order to avoid bankruptcy while working on a massive order.

Because just like in reality, in Little big Workshop everything costs money: the materials, the equipment, the maintenance, and the labor force. And you need to do much more than just pay your workers, you also have to pay attention to their surroundings in order to keep them motivated. This can be achieved by placing various decorations throughout the factory to improve their mood, a process that ties in with the personalizing of your factory to your liking. You also have to take into account that the more efficient your workers, the quicker the workstations deteriorate, needing maintenance and repairs. The longer you put off this process the longer it will take.

The entire system is correlated and every game mechanic depends on the others. Even the high-tech machinery will work with reduced efficiency if you neglect maintenance and even the best workers will collapse from fatigue if you do not have enough space for them to relax. The larger your factory becomes the crazier the heights the issues escalate to. You will have to deal with rodent infestations, alien parasites that attack your workers' brains, or garden gnomes that tear holes in the paper floor.

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You will have to deal personally with these issues by operating sleeping pill cannons or extracting manually the parasites from the workers you suspect of infection. Although this may sound like a lot of fun, these side tasks tend to pop up in the worst moments, when your attention is already required to fulfill important contracts. As such it is welcome that you can turn off this feature in the options menu, focusing only on the business simulation.

Unfortunately, other issues cannot be avoided easily. At launch, the game was a complete mess, with a broken save/load system that made it impossible to advance in the game. Since then several patches have been launched, but the dialogue screens tend to remain active even after the menus have been closed, the client orders are almost always doubled upon reloading a previously saved game and the workbenches sometimes are showing missing materials even if they are in your warehouse.

These are only a few of the issues that still plague the game from time to time. It is unfortunate that the experience that is so much fun is ruined by technical issues, that should have been fixed during the testing process and not through patches after launch.

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The Good

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