Assemble with Care

Assemble with Care is a game half about repairing items and half about someone meeting new people in a new city. Sadly, this one didn’t spark as much interest as I would have hoped.

Several things dragged this title down, I think. The premise is fantastic: as a former helpdesk employee, I often found joy in taking apart new laptops or other technological devices either to see how they worked (if they were scrap) or to repair them for customers. Unfortunately, Assemble with Care gets just a bit too much wrong to be enjoyable. The hilarity of having a single size of massive Phillips-head screws on an SLR, for example. Having exactly the parts you need and nothing else. Having everyone trust you implicitly to work on things which apparently cost thousands of dollars. Some of this can be chalked up to gamification, but some is simply glaring oversight; not needing to drag the film across to the take-up spool, for example. So much of the relaxation I got from taking apart actual items came from getting the right tool for the job or finding a clever way to use what I had available instead.

Part of these complaints likely come from the unexpected heavy emphasis on the story. Sadly, the game is too short to invest in the characters (out of 14 levels, I beat the first three in under 10 minutes including cutscenes). A pity, given the high potential, but sadly I must put this in Tier Three.

Steam link