Mob Factory mixes tower defense and factory automation in a cute, horrific mix

I enjoy games where enemies are a resource as much as a hazard. It's not enough that you can farm them for XP by killing them while they respawn, though. I also want to make the monsters appear myself.

So it is in Mob Factory, a blend of tower defense and factory management in which you quickly set up defenses against waves of worms, spiders, skeletons and so forth - and then set up spawners to create more waves, so you can turn their fallen remains into conveyor belts, walls, and eventually new islands to expand your monster-chewing factories upon. It just came out on Steam.

As Tony Montana famously said: first you get the defenses, then you get the automation, then you gradually increase the efficiency of both your defenses and automation via upgraded equipment and new tools.

Mob Factory is one of those ideas that seems so straightforwardly obvious that I'm sure it must have been done before, and yet I can't think of a game that mixes together these different genres in quite this way. My only question is whether it can appropriately balance its progression.

In both tower defense and factory management games I often find there's a moment where they become overwhelmingly difficult and I lose interest - else, I achieve some state of equilibrium, and without challenge there's no drive to tinker with my machine or build a new one. Mob Factory has lovely, colourful sprites and I want to sink into it for hours upon hours, if it'll have me.

If you feel similarly, it's on Steam now for £11.51/$13.49 thanks to a 10% launch discount.