As previously promised, I went back to play Infinifactory’s Resistance Campaign or at least tried my best at them. Story-wise, this set of missions takes place after the end of the first campaign and as its title indicates, covers the efforts of the escaped engineers to create a resistance against the Overlords. It’s a fair bit shorter than the first set of puzzles but more than makes up for it with the large sizes of the puzzles and their bewildering complexity.

The set includes four new types of blocks. The first of these of course is the downward-facing conveyor belt which is incredibly useful and convenient for making lifters easier to handle and getting blocks out of areas once assembly is complete. Then there’s the teleporter though it’s only used for the first set of missions in the new campaign. It teleports blocks, one at a time, from one location to another which are otherwise unconnected so the puzzles using it mostly involve breaking down an object into single blocks and then reconstructing on the other end. Quite fun and challenging as you wrap your head around how to build up a stream of blocks into finished objects.

Next are the lasers which are like eviscerators except that they have infinite range and can be controlled by sensors. Naturally these call for puzzles involving large blocks or sheets of raw material that must then be cut up into the correct shapes. I found these to be more straightforward though still quite fun. The last of the new blocks is a special counter sensor that activates only after it has detected a set number of blocks. I believe that theoretically you should be able to replace it with a regular sensor, but it does allow more compact solutions and as such is very handy.

Out of the four sections the campaign is divided into, I found the first two quite doable. However towards the end of the third section onwards the difficulty gets much harder and I realized that figuring out a solution on my own would either be impossible or take up more time than I was willing to devote to the game so I resorted to YouTube videos for their solutions. These involve the construction of truly massive objects that take up a lot of space. I also realized that feasibly solving them would require advanced techniques that aren’t really needed in the earlier campaign, such as attaching blocks to pushers, using rotators to create arms that swing around and having blocks float on the floor so that they can be moved around with pushers and blockers. It’s great when you get them to work but I always find it fiddly to set them up because the game doesn’t let you specify which surface the blocks you place attach to. The final section also involves installing welders into configurations that I totally did not realize would work.

I had fun following along the YouTube videos on the very large puzzles and I ended up being glad that I didn’t spend too much time figuring them out on my own because of how complex some of these end up being. I learned so much from watching them but it would be exhausting to painstakingly put them together like this. I did enjoy the real-time battle that is reminiscent of the boss battles in SpaceChem but is actually rather easy. On the whole I did enjoy this new set of missions but this is about as difficult as I care for the puzzles to get and I was rather relieved when it was all over. The ending is undeniably fantastic so let it not be said that Zachtronics’ games don’t have a story. Now on to the next game!