“When it came down to it, that was all any of us wanted. A second chance to make something right.”

Maria is a repairer who has just arrived in the city of Bellariva. Her plan is to do a few fixes to help cover the cost of a food festival happening in the city. With that simple setting, we are introduced to some of the people of Bellariva, their stories, and their old broken objects that we are in charge of fixing.

The repair of objects is introduced through a short piece of story from one of the city folks. After that, we are presented with a beautifully designed and accessible puzzle, which will not present a challenge to solve. These puzzles are the main mechanic of the game. I would say that the great visuals, the tight controls, and the relaxing music make a combination in which each puzzle is a joy to play.

At first glance, Assemble With Care is a short, cozy, and relaxing game, but deep down it is a game about second chances — for broken objects and human relationships. A game that feels like a small work of art.

I remember playing Motherload countless hours in Miniclip many years ago. The original game had some cool mechanics that glued together very well. The drill mechanic was fun, the cycle “drill → get resources → sell → improve → go deeper” was rewarding enough to make you wanna keep going, the fuel meter brought that “push your luck” feeling that made you evaluate the cost / benefit of continue or go back to the base all the time.

The first half of Super Motherload was exactly what I was looking for, it felt familiar and very enjoyable. During this period, I realized that the empty fuel meter does not kill you anymore, removing key tension moments and strategic from the original. Some new additions do not work well either:

- The story is bland and forgettable.
- The characters are shallow.
- The decisions the game prompts you to make are meaningless.
- The missions which objective is just to roam the map wishing to stumble upon items out of pure luck are just boring and effortless designed.

The good thing is that any of these things are deal breakers and the core mechanic is fun enough to handle the game’s progress on its own and keep you engaged at least until everything starts to crumble.

The issues start after you reach the last base. Once there you have to cover a ridiculous long distance to face the final boss, forcing you to make tens of travels back and forth in order to build yourself a path. At this point the main fun cycle of the game is gone because ship’s improvements are already pointless, this makes the whole section feels extremely repetitive, tedious and not fun.

Once reaching the final boss things get worst. Fighting it required you a new set of skills that were not used in any other part of the game before. Also the boss is unforgiving, at the smallest error it’s game over and back to the base to repeat the excessive long drop before being able to retry the boss fight. This greatly adds to the frustration you already carried over on the last hours of the game wrapping up an overall very bad experience. I would not be surprised if the amount of players reaching the final boss and dropping the game without beating it is very high.