Kubifaktorium

Falling a bit behind schedule these months. I have multiple longer games in progress at the moment, so I managed to fish out one of the lower rated games on my wishlist for this week - Kubifaktorium.
It's a game that starts out as a colony sim, seemingly taking a lot of inspiration from Dwarf Fortress, but then starts to add pieces of automation in as play progresses, this time taking inspiration from Factorio. While it's well made for a small team, it essentially delivers a heavily watered down amalgamation of the two games without doing anything new.

The game loop is quite simple. You first clear the land of its natural resources and use that to start your little colony. Then you put up farms, pastures, and groves to grow the resources yourself. You need drink, food, and housing for each of your colonists, and if you want to keep them extra happy (and thus productive), specific types of food and decorations / leisure activities around. These extra requirements get more complex as time goes on, but I generally found that trying to satisfy them takes more time than the colonists being more productive saves, so I just ignored that part of the game.
I didn't get too far into the automation part, but essentially you just set up alternate versions of your facilities that work automatically, once you get past the hurdle of making metals and the automation parts manually. It's not really all that different from the first half of the game, because your colonists are already "automatic" if you think about it.

In the end, despite trying to combine two of my possibly favorite games ever, Kubifaktorium made the common mistake of doing multiple things badly, instead of doing a single thing well. It doesn't have even a fraction of the depth that makes Dwarf Fortress so fascinating, nor is the automation nearly as satisfying as in Factorio. There is significantly less content, and further still, I think the two genres don't even mix that well, thus leading to a game that's less than the sum of its parts. Overall, I can't think of any real reason to play this over many other games from either genre. There is no merit to trying to combine them here, and I would thus not recommend this.