Industria 2 Review – Second Time’s The Charm

The first Industria came out all the way back in 2021, and while I liked it at the time, it always felt like developer Bleakmill may have bitten off more than it could chew. Five years later, we now have a sequel, and many of the same issues that plagued the original continue to be a problem in Industria 2.

Despite the development team clearly being ambitious with its story, gameplay, and visuals, Industria 2 is held back by uneven technical performance, some awkward level design, and inconsistent polish. That said, our experience across two different PC setups also showed that some of its worst issues may be hardware or configuration-specific, because underneath those problems is a solid, atmospheric, slow-paced shooter that often works better than its roughest moments suggest.

It is worth noting that our technical experience with Industria 2 varied quite a bit between two different PC setups. On one AMD-based setup, which included Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, and a Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU, the experience of playing Industria 2 started on a frustrating note. After some time spent on shader compilation, the DirectX 12 version of Industria 2 seems to have trouble understanding some of the graphics settings I chose.

Among other things, despite the fact that I manually set the in-game resolution to be my monitor’s native one—2560×1440—the game itself refuses to go beyond 1920×1080. Stranger still, there doesn’t seem to be any way for players with AMD graphics cards to disable frame generation. While the feature seems to be baked into the toggles for FSR, Nvidia users, on the other hand, can find a separate setting to enable or disable frame generation.

This has also meant that, when playing the DirectX 12 version of Industria 2 which supports full ray tracing, I also have to deal with input lag thanks to the frame generation, making the gameplay experience as a whole feel a lot more sluggish than it should. With Steam’s overlay helpfully telling me that I was maintaining around 150 FPS with frame generation, an option to disable it while still getting over 60 FPS would have been my preferred way of experiencing the first-person horror adventure game. This ultimately led me to play the DirectX 11 version of Industria 2, which is referred to by the studio as its “Performance Mode”.

Speaking of performance, I was able to maintain stable frame rates regardless of whether I was playing the DirectX 12 “Ray Tracing” version or the DirectX 11 “Performance Mode” version. The former, as I mentioned, was running at around 150 FPS with frame generation, which would put its true frame rate at around 70, while the latter basically ran at between 80 and 100 FPS throughout.

"Interact with a wooden plank, for example, at a slightly off angle, and you’re likely to see it fly away into space."

When it comes to the game itself, I would be remiss to not mention the sheer number of bugs related to physics, movement, and even NPC chatter triggers that I experienced throughout my time with the game on my AMD set up. Interact with a wooden plank, for example, at a slightly off angle, and you’re likely to see it fly away into space. Movement also feels strange; aside from the general sluggishness brought on by frame generation, there are also quite a few invisible walls that tend to completely halt your momentum.

One memorable (and downright hilarious) bug I experienced in the earlier parts of Industria 2 was the fact that crafting bullets kept prompting the nearby NPC to give me the entire bullet crafting tutorial again. While this last one didn’t really impede my progress throughout the game or make things less fun on a second-to-second basis, it still acted as a major indicator that Bleakmill needed to spend a lot more time on polishing Industria 2 before releasing it.

However, on our Nvidia-based setup, the experience was noticeably smoother. Running the game on an RTX 3080 Ti, a Ryzen 9 5950X, without DLSS, Industria 2 delivered decent overall performance. There were noticeable drops in some outdoor areas, but the game was generally stable and playable. I did not encounter the same crash-heavy experience, though I did run into one serious progression-blocking bug that forced me to reload the entire chapter. That was messy and frustrating, but it was not enough to completely derail the overall experience. Updates have already addressed some issues, but Industria 2 still feels like a game that would benefit from more polish.

As for the game itself, Industria 2 is a first-person action horror game in the vein of something like Resident Evil Village, where your time will often be split between slow, methodical exploration and intense combat against horrifying monstrosities. The twist here is that, rather than simply pressing a button to open a door, you have to hold down the interact key, the left click in my case, and drag the door open.

This has the side effect of making the game’s world feel like a more real place where physics seem to apply, and even makes encounters with enemies a scarier prospect, since you can’t simply open a door to quickly run past them.

"Once you get past its rough edges, Industria 2 can often be quite fun."

The Resident Evil influences in Industria 2 go deeper than just genre conventions as well. Aside from concepts like scarcity of ammo and limited inventory space, there is also a crafting system that encourages you to take your time in exploring the world behind you. Interestingly, the crafting system also led to me never having to worry about my ammo counts, since I always had enough to simply craft more bullets. Speaking of which, the arsenal in Industria 2 isn’t particularly interesting, but it does offer the kind of power curve you would expect, starting you off with an axe before giving you a pistol, a shotgun, and more.

Once you get past its rough edges, Industria 2 can often be quite fun. The title does a great job of setting up tense moments where you often have to make split-second decisions about whether you should sneak past the hostile robots or simply take them out, and you’ll often have to juggle this with solving some nearby puzzles. Even the pacing is quite well done, and while it starts slow, things quickly escalate once you’ve wrapped up the opening, gotten your hands on a gun, and have to travel to a new area.

The crafting system is also decent. It is not especially deep, but it gives exploration more purpose and makes resource management feel meaningful without becoming annoying. Weapon progression follows a similarly simple but effective structure. You can upgrade your weapons and feel a gradual sense of growth without the system getting in the way of the game’s pacing.

Enemy variety is decent as well, with enough different threats to keep encounters from becoming completely repetitive. The AI could definitely be sharper, and enemies do not always react as intelligently as they should, but the it works within the game’s slower and more deliberate structure.

"The art style gives the game a strong identity, and its industrial environments, strange machinery, and unsettling atmosphere do a lot of heavy lifting."

The visuals are one of the stronger areas of Industria 2. The art style gives the game a strong identity, and its industrial environments, strange machinery, and unsettling atmosphere do a lot of heavy lifting. The sound department is less impressive. It gets the job done, but for a game so dependent on atmosphere, it could have done more to heighten tension, sell environmental details, and make combat feel more impactful.

Level design is also uneven. Industria 2 often presents spaces that look more open or explorable than they actually are, with plenty of closed doors and blocked routes that can make areas feel more restrictive than expected. It is not a deal-breaker, because the overall structure still works, but it does occasionally make exploration feel less natural than it should.

The story of Industria 2 picks up some time after the events of its 2023 predecessor. The game puts you in the shoes of Nora, trapped in an alternate version of Germany where an AI named ATLAS is running things and creating horrific creatures. Despite your best efforts in the previous game, you find yourself still stuck in this alternate world, looking for a way to get back to your own dimension while also dodging the strange things ATLAS has created. The premise and story are quite interesting, and do a lot to offset some of the more annoying aspects of the game.

Industria 2 is a rough but worthwhile sequel. Its technical state is uneven, and our experience varied significantly between two PC setups, with one AMD-based configuration facing far more serious issues than an Nvidia-based one. It also has some awkward level design, AI that could be better, and at least one serious progression-blocking bug that forced a chapter reload.

Even so, its slow and methodical gameplay, decent crafting, simple but effective weapon progression, solid enemy variety, strong visual identity, and compelling atmosphere make it easier to appreciate than its roughest moments suggest. It needed more polish, and players should be aware that the technical experience may vary, but there is enough here to recommend it to fans of atmospheric first-person horror adventures.

This game was reviewed on PC.