Automachef

What it is

Automachef tasks players with engineering an automated fast-food kitchen: placing conveyor belts, cooking and packaging machines, and a rudimentary programmable computer to assemble customer orders correctly while minimizing wasted ingredients, energy and money. Developed by Rhombico Games and published by Team17, it releases across a campaign of increasingly complex kitchen puzzles plus a separate contracts mode, released on 23 July 2019 at NZD 18.49.

Its review corpus, 270 in English, sits at a genuine Mostly Positive 71.1% (192 to 78), and reading through it in depth reveals a game whose core concept draws real, specific admiration — set against a large, detailed share of reviewers arguing the execution is considerably more restrictive and interface-heavy than the genre's best examples.

A genuinely appealing concept with real optimization satisfaction

Reviewers consistently credit Automachef's premise and difficulty curve with real appeal. "Automachef is a very nice automation-oriented logical puzzle game in which you're not only designing a solution to given menu, but also optimizing the efficiency by trying to use the least amount of ingredients, power and money," writes one detailed reviewer, drawing a direct comparison to the similarly-themed Big Pharma. Another reviewer praises the escalating challenge specifically: "the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly and soon enough you'll find yourself scraping an entire design and starting over. It does however feel very rewarding when you get it right." A separate reviewer frames the game as genuinely demanding in a positive sense: "talk about a puzzle game that gets really hard... Automachef does what it sets out to do very, very well. It's a serious logic puzzle game under that robotic fast food factory skin."

A large, detailed case that the design is too restrictive

Set against that praise, a substantial critical thread argues Automachef falls short of the genre's open-ended promise. "While the game seems sandboxy at first it instead only allows a very limited set of solutions. If the balancing would be less restrictive in regards to the level goals, it would open up the puzzle," writes one detailed reviewer who returned to the game years later only to find the same limitation unaddressed. A separate reviewer makes the comparison explicit and unflattering: "my wife said to me 'you like Factorio, you would like this' but this is nothing like that, even the logistics is severely limited. You only get a small amount of space with limited machines that only do certain work... the word limited is the theme for this." A third reviewer raises a specific, mechanically grounded complaint about the game's signature programming feature: "the programming computer machine in this game is so unnecessarily complicated, because you cannot use other machines' outputs as inputs, that render the programmable computer basically useless" — a concrete design flaw in what should be the game's most distinctive system.

A widely and specifically criticized interface

Beyond design-scope complaints, this corpus documents extensive, repeated interface frustration. "The UI/UX making it necessary hard/fiddly to build your kitchen," writes one reviewer, while another lists specific, concrete grievances: "solutions don't autosave. The continue button sends you back to the main menu, which is unintuitive, and lacks a way to cancel when you misclick it." A separate, detailed reviewer identifies the most repeated specific complaint: "changing machine settings takes forever and you have to do them one by one. No quick replace and no pipette tool," a design gap that turns what should be simple bulk adjustments into tedious, repetitive individual clicks across every affected machine. That's a specific, checkable usability failure distinct from the broader design-restriction critique, and it recurs independently across many reviews using nearly identical language. One reviewer sums up the cumulative frustration bluntly: "I'm sure there is a great game hiding in here. It's got all of the elements that will eventually make it great... but it's not there right now," naming Overcooked, Factorio and Infinifactory as clear influences the final product doesn't quite live up to on execution alone.

A campaign that sours around the midpoint

Several detailed reviewers report the game's difficulty transitions unpleasantly rather than simply escalating. "The game stops being fun about halfway through," writes one reviewer who returned specifically to chase achievements, describing later levels where "the solution is less about logic and more about tweaking individual machine settings on a hundred-plus" separate controls — repetitive fine-tuning rather than the creative problem-solving the earlier campaign offered. A separate reviewer raises a related, specific complaint about the game's efficiency-scoring system: "the game penalizes you on wasted ingredients but doesn't actually give you the tools to minimize output," describing a frustrating mismatch between what the game judges players on and what it actually equips them to control.

What the achievement data confirms

Automachef's achievement curve shows an unusually steep drop after the very first milestone: 63.3% for the earliest achievement, collapsing to just 14.7% for the second and falling into single digits for everything beyond that. That's a notably sharp early cliff compared to other puzzle and automation games this lane has covered, consistent with a real, substantial share of buyers bouncing off shortly after the tutorial — plausibly connected to the interface friction and restrictive early-level design documented throughout this corpus rather than simple lack of interest in the genre.

Verdict

Automachef pairs a genuinely appealing automation-puzzle concept with real, satisfying difficulty for players who push through its early hours. But a large, detailed share of its own reviewers make a specific, credible case that its level design is more restrictive than genre benchmarks promise, and a widely and repeatedly criticized interface adds real, avoidable friction on top of that. Worth trying at a discount for genre fans specifically drawn to tightly-constrained logic puzzles, with tempered expectations for open-ended factory-building freedom.