Satisfactory

This game has been consuming and is on track to utterly ruin my entire life. Absolutely recommend if you like making satisfying factories.

You’re a pioneer sent by FICSIT to the planet MASSAGE-2(A-B)b, a stunningly beautiful handcrafted world. No procedural generation here, only different starting locations, but the whole world is available to explore (and exploit) for all players. Having a hand-crafted world means that there are certain well paced challenges built into the environment itself, as well as lots of goodies to find while exploring, and lots of logistical challenges to work around since you can’t just reroll world generation until you find a configuration of ores that you like.

As for the core gameplay, this is a factory building game with exploration and (not particularly great) PvE combat. There are no meters to manage other than health and equipment costs (such as gasmask filters and rebar gun ammo), the few sources of food you find scattered around just directly heal you, and there is no hunger or thirst or stamina or anything like that. The world doesn’t try and impose itself on you, you’re there to impose yourself on the world. The FICSIT motto is “Construct, Automate, Explore & Exploit”. Emphasis on the Exploit, as resource nodes are infinite so instead of having to expand to find more resources, the main goal is to squeeze as much throughput out of the limited resource nodes available to you.

When starting off, you drop down on the map at your designated starting location, and your first objective is to find iron and build the HUB, which is your basic upgrade/progression system. Once the hub is placed down, you can then find the resources to construct it and unlock machines such as automatic personal miners, biofuel generators, and furnaces, which let you process the iron ore into iron bars, and so on. By the time you finish tier 0 (constructing the HUB), you should have access to everything you need to build your first small factory.

From there you get 3 systems for progression. Continuing through the HUB unlocks more machines, tools, equipment, processes, vehicles, etc, which are all required to construct “Proejct parts”, which feed into the Project, something at the top of a space elevator which while providing no immediate benefit, unlocks more tiers in the HUB, creating this back and forth. The last upgrade system is the Matter Analysis Machine (MAM), which is a set of tech trees to unlock upgrades and equipment such as higher tier power poles, the rebar gun, and the Dimensional Depot.

Building a factory is a lengthy but very satisfying and rewarding process, but machines require components to build, so before you can make big factories, you gotta start with small factories. But there is a new feature that was just added to make factory building far easer: the Dimensional Depot. This is a machine that acts like a storage crate, but uploads anything you throw into it into a storage dimension, which you can access from your inventory, crafting bench, and build gun. So you can use conveyor belts to upload all the materials that you need to build a big factory, and it means you don’t have to keep running back to base to stock up on supplies! Do note that there is no automatic way of pulling out of the storage dimension, only manual ones, so you can’t use the dimensional depot to sidestep building logistics systems.

The other main aspect of the game is the exploration and combat, and unfortunately this is where the game faulters. The combat isn’t particularly deep, and takes a while to get used to, leading to a lot of unfair deaths, especially when there are more than one hostile mob around. Hostiles fall into 4 groups: hogs which charge, stingers that jump at you, spitters that shoot fireballs, and spawners that create really annoying bees that hunt you down. They all die to a few hits of a weapon or gun, but after a while it gets boring and tedious to do so. Thankfully mobs spawn at specific locations rather than randomly through the map, so you can set up shop in a relatively peaceful place and not worry about it.

Exploration is going to be a requirement though, both to find new resource nodes to exploit, and new locations for factories, but also to find the 4 main limited resources: power slugs, which are used to overclock machines; Mercer spheres, which are required for dimensional depots; Somersloops, which are used to either boost your power grid in the late game, or double machine outputs; and hard drives, which unlock alternate recipes that can be cheaper, faster, use different resources, or any combination. Building big factories starts with deciding where to build and what alternates to use to best optimise your production lines.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870 £33.50
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/satisfactory £33.50