how the fuck do i play this??
Reviews for "Geneva Convection"
has potential. Needs to be easier to begin with.
it needs better instructions (i can't tell which way to turn the knobs)
I'm giving this a 2/5.
As others have said, there is no tutorial, very unforgiving play at first. But the instructions helped me figure it out, and I played the game. Except, there truly isn't anything more to this game than turning the wrench, trying to get the rooms to the right temperature. Once you do that, the rest of the game is simply maintaining the temperature, and then waiting while capacitor charges.
"But what about the upgrades?" some may ask. Well, I upgraded every single thing to the max. The steam still affected the valves, but it did seem much easier to make things "stay put", since the whole point of the game is to do that, I was golden. Upgrades were o.k. Main problem with the upgrades was related to the capacitor and power generation - once they are upgraded to the max, it takes quite a long time (probably 30-60s) to fill the capacitor. This is a waste when you are destroying "tiny" cities as compared with the larger cities.
Lastly, and the main reason I'm giving this a low rating is that there is no end game. I destroyed all the largest cities. And the next largest, and the next largest. All the cities remaining were <= $70k, but nothing changed. I was just charging the laser and that was it. There really should be a "win" condition, maybe after you destroy all of the $200k cities.
At this point, I decided to see what happened when I let rooms get maximally cold, or maximally hot. When they were cold, they just weren't doing anything, no problems there. When they got too hot, kaboom, whoopsie. Then you have to repair. I was able to repair any of the places that got destroyed, except for the capactor. Well, there's a story with that --> you *can* fix the capacitor room when it blows. The problem is, all the other rooms are freezing, including the room which is supposed to cool it down. So within 2 seconds of you fixing the capacitor room, it blows again, and you pretty much have no chance of fixing it. I suppose that is reasonable, but then there shouldn't be any of this "its getting hotter!!" stuff. That should be happening if the capacitor room itself is getting hot, and the game should just end if you blow the capacitor room.
And then a little nitpicking, I wanted the animation of me blowing up bigger cities to be actually bigger cities.
Amazing graphics, incredible concept, bad instructions, horrible instant-fail gave over condition. You have already heard about the first three, so I will talk about the latter.
On every playthrough, no matter what strategy I pick (balanced, focusing on valves, focusing on thermostats, rapid expansion, maintaining generator blue), before I even destroy more than 5 cities, either of the big rooms (generator or capacitor array) blows up, which leads to this vicious cycle:
1. All rooms and valves turn blue; the latter don't react to.
2. Fix the broken big room.
3. Turn the valve of this or other cooler to full red.
4. Before or right after 3., the other big room overheats and blows up.
5. Go to 1.
Having to manually restart the game every time this happens gets irritating pretty fast.