Robots take care of all the hard work on the globe while humanity can lean back and enjoy life at its fullest. Sounds like a dream doesn’t it? The game seven billion humans starts by informing the player that exactly this utopia is now a reality.
It’s the age of the singularity and our generous robotic overlords try to make life as comfortable as possible. However, suddenly humanity wants to work.
So, what will metal men do? How about building a gigantic skyscraper with enough jobs for all the seven billion humans on the planet.
Your endgame self seems to be someone special because instead of being one of the drones doing mindless work you get to all of them around. How do you do that? Through very simplified programming.
In the first couple levels, you are introduced to the base mechanics making your workers move objects around, picking items up, taking a couple of steps, dropping them again. Sounds easy enough right?
The craziness ramps up a lot throughout. There are almost 70 levels though towards the end a standard process description sounds more like this:
Write a hundred line code that makes workers sought a multitude of data cubes from art to even to prime numbers. And if a woman picks up a cube that’s divisible by three, she explodes.
If you want your minions to do stuff you put the corresponding instruction into your program and then they will follow the orders until they reach the end of your code.
The drag-and-drop interface makes the game rather user friendly but especially towards the end, it becomes a bit tedious to have to drag a multitude of instructions into place.
It would be a huge improvement if you could copy and paste certain blocks of code and not just the whole thing. Maybe in a future update.
If the prospect of tougher levels isn’t enough for all your true masochists out there, there are additional challenges for every stage. These optional tasks can make you want to tear yourself.
For example, there is one level that needs to be beaten in less than nine commands and in under 35 seconds. I got the time down to 36 but not further and it drives me a bit crazy. I scraped everything multiple times and started from zero and that usually helps but not here.
You should never be afraid to try completely new solutions but sometimes the exact opposite is actually a better idea. I often find myself returning to levels I already completed to ‘steal the code’ from there and expand on it instead of writing everything from zero.
While the tasks are all rather unique in their short and sweet setup, they overlap in mechanics and ask you to do similar things with a twist. And if it’s only a robot with whirling blade arms that stretch your minions to pieces if you cross its path sometimes that doesn’t mean that the puzzles are bad just that there is a limit to their complexity.
I actually think that’s part of the beauty of this game. It’s challenging at times but is also doable without having a degree in programming.