Quick Review: Beltmatic

Imagine, if you will, every factory-building game ever, but reduced to the simplest expression.

Just one of many, many factories.

A creation of Notional Games released on March 29th, 2024, Beltmatic puts you in charge of a “factory” in which numbers are created. You see numbers scattered around the giant map, and a big delivery area in the circle. All the numbers you create must be directed to this delivery area using treadmills and extractors. Set an extractor onto a number, link it to the delivery area with treadmills. Collect enough of the number that’s requested, and you go up a level! Now you have a different number to collect, and you may have unlocked something new.

It takes so much work in the early game to get numbers
anywhere close to 10...

At first, all you have is 1s, but then you’ll unlock 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on – it doesn’t seem like much, but these add up. As you level up, your prime request is the number on the delivery space – and these numbers become harder to obtain. It’s not always a prime, but it usually is, or it’s just one or two operations away from a prime number. You unlock new tools over time; the first is a bridge allowing your treadmills to cross over each other, which quickly becomes necessary.

The mathematical buildings have different shapes and function differently from each other. Most involve an A and a B – yes, we’re getting algebraic in here –, the operation, and its result. First is the adder, A+B. Then it’s the multiplier, A*B. The subtractors and dividers are A-B and A÷B, so you must pay very close attention to which number is sent where. For division, you end up with both the proper result, and then the remainder (ex. 5÷2=2, with remainder of 1), so you can use these to obtain other numbers that you can redirect elsewhere if necessary. The final operation is the exponentiator, or A^B; you can get some big numbers out of that one. It takes a while to unlock every option but having them all available is a plus.

Your factory will get pretty damn big after a while.

The final unlock is a storage box, which you can put on the field to store one number into a single area, so that your buildings can keep producing numbers instead of letting them get stuck at the end of a treadmill. Storage squares can contain up to 10,000 of a number. In addition, you can create new treadmills leading out of a storage square and into more operations and buildings.

Alright, I've made the number I wanted, not to tie it all
back to the delivery area. That shouldn't take too long.

But you don’t have just one number to produce every time; you can level up your treadmills and buildings so that they’ll churn out operations faster, allowing for more numbers to get produced per minute and reduce clutter as numbers go through. This will subtract a lot of the time taken for numbers to get to your facility after going through many other buildings on the way. However, leveling up any building will be tough, as you need to collect a large amount of up to three different numbers beforehand. There is no other cost to upgrading a building or the treadmills; just the hard work of making the numbers through complex series of operations, and getting them home.

With all 6 buildings unlocked, that’s an extra 18 numbers to crunch. This multiplies the factories around your reception area – not to mention just how much it divides your attention. Good thing there’s a menu keeping track of all the numbers getting fed into your delivery dock, and which ones are no longer necessary – this can allow you to cut off the unnecessary branches and delete those factories.

Everything's moving into the delivery area, riiiiight there
at the left of this screenshot.

You can unlock all the achievements by reaching Level 30 and upgrading all the buildings to Level 8. I've done both, so I personally consider to have beaten this game. It’s a fun challenge to figure out how to reach all the numbers that are requested. Really, this game is all mathematics, so it’s going to appeal to nerds like me and other folks who like crunching numbers, but may not be for fans of more classic factory-building games. I suggest playing with the PC’s calculator open, and maybe the factors calculator in a window. One of the bigger issues is just how many of each number is needed to go up a level or upgrade a facility; it eventually turns into a waiting game when you can’t produce them faster and need to wait for those quantities to tick up. The other option is to repeat your factories wherever possible to produce more of one specific number per second. But overall, yeah, it's a fun one.

…Okay, I’ve made exponentially more math puns here than usual.

Beltmatic is currently available on Steam for 6.99$ USD.