Factorio is an incredible game of crafting, research and automation where you crashland on a planet with almost no resources and nothing available to you until you manage to create a sprawling base filled with machines building everything you could ever dream of. Its got depth, challenge and plenty of time-filling action trying to optimize systems, perfect processes and optimize solutions. I had an absolute blast with it!
Starting on a crashed spaceship with only a pistol and a few bullets, this game start with the mining of resources manually. You will mine copper, iron, stone and coal using a pickaxe then build a furnace to smelt some of these into other materials, which you will then use to build automated mining machines, conveyor belts and a ton of other things. The fun of factorio really resides in unlocking the next thing; science, vehicles, electricity, drones, nuclear fission and the like and there is a lot to get. You’ll have massive constructions mining for resources and sending them via conveyor belts to complex systems that - using mechanical arms - will feed machines to create wondrous things, all of which are useful in another of these systems.
In order to slow you down, aliens that feed on pollution and are attracted to you if you ever get pollution too close to your base offer a light challenge but they’re not the main focus of the game. At some point you can deal with them super easily and you can ignore them safely. Space becomes a bit of an issue as well. You can either destroy all of your setups to get your conveyor belts sending resources at the right place or your base can become a huge mess of power lines and machines barely able to do their work. It all depends on how much you want to ‘optimize’ your gameplay. If a science lab takes 5 items per second to function and making that item requires 3 other items, do you have the right production of raw resources and of all involved items? Your setup will work regardless, but some players will love the idea of systems working perfectly together.
And there’s a lot to love! Train systems, oil and fluid systems, electricity production, modular armor, upgrades for your characters and for your buildings, sometimes the UI is a bit clunky for certain things and I had to learn how various things work without much as in-game help but overall the core systems are easy to grasp, and you build complexity over them until you complete the final objective of the game and launch yourself in a rocket.
I really, really enjoyed my time with Factorio! I played it with a few friends that had sunk an infinite number of hours into the game already, so my experience wasn’t exactly typical - as they could explain a few concepts to me, but on the flipside wanted things to be optimized when I was just learning the ropes - but it gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling I had back in the days of automation mods for minecraft, so if you enjoy building things and also building things that build more things, definitely give this game a look!
