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Satisfactory

Satisfactory is a game about automating production chains and building pretty factories. It's like 3D Factorio, but has a heavy emphasis on pretty buildings in 3D (in addition to complex production chains). It's beautiful, well optimised and totally absorbing for people who like to automate things. There's tons of content, and everything from the UI to the machines is made in loving detail. There's also a beautiful world to explore and exploit. It took me probably 3 attempts to actually get into the game, but once I got to about Phase 3 it finally clicked and I got drawn in.

Notes

There's a beautiful amount of attention to detail here. The miners play a whole animation before they start drilling. Coolant is added, then it starts drilling down before they start producing. There's a coffee mug that you can carry around and drink which occasionally clinks against your helmet. Walking into a glass wall goes "bonk" like walking into a window. The manual crafting panel slowly starts to heat up, then smokes, then goes yellow as you make more and more things in a row. It's little things like that that really make it immersive and a joyful thing to play.

Pros

  • The game is gorgeous. The planet is beautiful and the lighting effects make all factories look great
  • You can ride conveyor belts
  • Great background music
  • Amazingly well optimised. It's a very complicated game with many many assets and it always runs flawlessly
  • Huge freedom of what to build and how
  • There's a "Hypertube" system which is basically mail tubes for yourself, for fast travel
  • Can overclock and underclock buildings, which lets you make systems at 100% efficiency
  • Getting a production chain finished and seeing your products being created automatically is extremely rewarding
  • Resource nodes are infinite (which is good and bad)
  • The dialogue is hilarious
  • The game has hundreds of hours worth of content. To the extent that most people never see the late game (4.5% of players have the achievement for finishing the game)
  • The building controls are great. What could have been a potentially clunky area of the game is actually really great. There are guides, multiple snapping modes, holograms, multiple build modes, and you can even leave a hologram of where the building will be placed and walk around it to make sure it's in the right spot before placing (and nudge it around if it isn't).
  • Mods don't disable achievements

Cons

  • I kinda dislike the alternate recipe mechanic. I'd rather there was just one way to make things
  • Progress is very very slow. Many people complete the game after 200+ hours
  • You can't block off slots on a container like Factorio, where you can tell a container of 24 slots to only fill 1 of those slots
  • There are no circuit logistics
  • The train UI is pretty basic
  • The phase of the game where you don't have renewable power yet and you just have to run around the map gathering biomass is not fun
  • You can't reverse the direction of an existing lift or conveyor
  • Blueprints are clunky, and not big enough considering the scale you're expected to build at
  • You can't rotate a hologram after locking it (get the Infinite Nudge mod)
  • If you remove a building or splitter, you have to also delete all the belts going into it and rebuild them
  • There are only 4 lights (!), and they're all huge. The game badly needs some smaller lighting options. Solvable with the Structural Solutions mod
  • Fluids are still buggy and unreliable in 1.0. There are dozens of posts on Reddit about diagnosing fluid problems. Floor holes being a prime bug candidate. They work for some people, but equally cause random issues for many. This is a flaw in an otherwise amazing system
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