Like a sci-fi strategy game, but greyer.

There are some great things that Grey Goo does really well, like well-differentiated units, interesting mission objectives, an intense soundtrack, and an aesthetically-strong campaign, with gorgeous cinematics and believable storytelling (at least as far as I saw). Unfortunately it stumbles on some really fundamental stuff that ruins the game, even after I feel like I should "get" it.

It's not just that the basic hub-and-spoke building mechanic is unintuitive; it is, but that's not the whole story. Even after I learned that I had to keep factory F connected to hub H and attachments A1 and A2 also connected to hub H in order to build units X and Y with factory F -- maintaining that mess was a chore. Having to remember which factories can build which units is a silly problem to have, when other games will simply have different buildings for different unit types.

But even that wasn't bad enough to make me quit the game in frustration. The problem I couldn't take any more of was hub placement.

Different sizes of hub buildings can have different numbers/arrangements of other buildings connected to them, and the way in which the map allows or disallows particular connection positions is absolute fucking voodoo. There appears to be an effect from terrain height, as implied by grass density on the map?, but not all the time. And although you can rotate a hub while placing it, you can't rotate it until after a location has been picked -- so, if none of the possible rotations work out, you have to start at a new pixel-perfect location with the default rotation, and try everything all over again. I wasted minutes at a time trying to place a medium hub such that it could actually use all four of its possible connections, and still failed most of the time.

When the hardest thing about a strategy game is figuring out where and how to place the most basic structure, then the game is wrong.

Progress: Gave up in mission 3.