Satisfactory
Satisfactory is a game about automating production chains; basically 3D Factorio. 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. That being said, the progression is extremely slow and I think Factorio is the better factory game.
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. 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
- Fantastic building system. Total freedom of placement, but can also make foundations to snap to a grid. Conveyer belts snap to entry and exit points on buildings
- Beautiful planet
- Can ride conveyor belts
- Great background music
- Really well optimised
- I had fully automated power after 12 hours
- There's a "hyper tube" system which is basically mail tubes for yourself, for fast travel
- Can overclock and underclock buildings, which lets you meet the amount of materials needed exactly
- Getting a production chain finished and seeing your products being created automatically is extremely rewarding
- Resource nodes are infinite (which is good and bad)
- Everything from my wishlist during EA made it into full release
- The dialogue is hilarious
- Lines appear when building to tell you if things line up
- The building controls are great. What could have been a potentially clunky area of the game is as good as I can imagine it being. 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.
Cons
- You can't pause the game in single player
- In-game progress is very very slow
- Probably the slowest Early Access development pace I've ever seen - typically one update a year
- When making things by hand, you have to sit there holding the mouse button down instead of saying "make 50"
- 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
- The phase of the game where you don't have renewable power yet and you just have to run around the map for an hour gathering biomass is not fun
- You can't be resupplied by logistics bots so you have to manually go and collect materials all the time
- Only one chainsaw sound effect