I uploaded some screenshots of Automation cars (in BeamNG) and noticed a few friends add it to their wishlists, and one of them bought it, so I thought I'd better put this out there as a disclaimer:

Don't buy this game. Please.

I've considered it, and to the best of my recollection Automation is, literally, the most poorly designed piece of commercially released software I've ever used. Automation is like if Gene Ray's "Time Cube" was a video game; it makes perfect sense to the person who made it, and to everybody else it's a wilfully, obnoxiously, confusing mess.

Creating a car in Automation involves an enormous number of variables; a change to A influences B through Z. Let's take an example of how this looks in game; if you're wondering whether to buy Automation, please, work through this with me, and it should give you a pretty good angle on whether this game will work for you.

One of the stats you end up with is an overall 'reliability' score for your car. Almost every value you change on your car will impact this in some way, so if you have a low reliability score, you may not know which of your choices or settings have caused that. I'm going to link a screenshot of how Automation conveys the information about how your choices impact the car's reliability; have a look through it:

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3148256798

Once you've got over your astonishment at a human being thinking the formula beneath "Total Car + Engine Reliability" is anything other than a comically ridiculous thing to put in a video game, I want you to work out how the reliability of your gearbox impacts your "total car + engine reliability".

Tried it? Seen the two columns for 'gearbox', with no indication as to what they are or how they interact? No guide as to how those row of columns inform the 'total' figure at the bottom of 'Base Values' - the one that appears to go into that equation?

Automation thinks this is a reasonable way to present information, and all of its information is presented in a way that's so obtuse that it's hard to think how anyone could have designed this other than with the intention of being as obtuse as possible. This is the whole game. This is a complicated game but it's not just that it doesn't give you any guidance - it gives you no guidance, and then arranges itself in a way that is so arbitrary, so unintuitive, and so illogical, then looks at you like you're supposed to be able to follow.

You have sliders to adjust the 'morphing' (shape) of your car body - there may be twenty of them, and the four sliders that impact the shape of your front bumper will often be distributed throughout the list rather than grouped together. Many sliders do not work and do not change any shape on the car. Some cars have sliders that have no descriptions of what part of the car they alter, being labelled "Key_1" through "Key_10".

Automation spectacularly screws up arranging twenty sliders in a row. Can you imagine how bad it is at a campaign where you have to manage a factory, production lines, timescales, and dozens of other things, even before you've designed the car?

Automation probably makes complete sense - to the designer of Automation. To them, I'm sure this is a completely coherent way to lay out information. It absolutely isn't. The reference from the start of this review is, genuinely, perfect - this is Time Cube, the game.

But I've played this game for, like, 1,500 hours? Wasn't I having fun?

Yes, I was, for most of it. Frustrated for quite a lot of it too, but yeah, it's fun. But if you're going to enjoy it, like I do, you've already got it. You're the sort of person who's thinks things like:
• "I'm gonna put a flat six in things I'm not supposed to put a flat six in!"
•"What if the GM A body was a hit with car enthusiasts and they ended up making an AWD performance model - a pushrod V8 live axle American answer to Japanese performance cars?"
•"The Lotus Elan M100 should have been transverse mid engined and I'm gonna do it."
•"What would a Cadillac pony car have looked like?"

If you're that sorta person then this review doesn't apply to you, but you don't need to know that 'cos you've already bought the game as soon as you saw it.

If you're anyone else, don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bother. Automation isn't worth your money, but more importantly it's not worth your time or your effort.