Gamescom '14: Machineers turns you into a robot repairman, then boggles your brainbox with puzzles
Another cog in the machine
Machineers is a game for technicians.
Rather than create a nice, familiar match-three puzzler to give the average Candy Crush Saga fan something new to smear their thumb against, developer Lohika Games has built a game filled with gears, pistons, pulleys, and levers, all of which must be arranged and assembled perfectly if you want to get anywhere.
As you can see from our video, you play the part of a rusty robot who must wander a scrapyard making friends and fixing machines.
While your interactions with other android in the overworld play out like a point-and-click adventure, the puzzles themselves are influenced by the amazing contraptions genre.
Pilfering from a stack of mechanical parts on the left side of the screen, you have to rebuild the broken devices you find scattered around the scrapyard by dragging and dropping parts into place.
The machines themselves are surprisingly intricate, and getting them back to working order often requires serious thought, and no small amount of trial and error.
You can see a couple of our repair jobs in the Machineers hands-on below. As soon as we have a release date, we'll let you know.