Satisfactory is a first person simulation game where you land on a remote planet and must discover new technologies, build bases and fend off against the wildlife. I would easily describe this as “like factorio, but in 3D”, but it is a bit reductive. Satisfactory has a lot of charm, a really neat style and good ideas, but I feel like being in three dimensions hurts it in a few ways and that most parts of the game have elements that clearly overwhelmed me. It’s still really good! I’m not sure I’ll keep up with its development, but I’ll certainly recommend it!
The beginning of the game is fairly simple; You drop on a large planet with only a few resources and need to find iron ore. You do this manually at first, then with portable miners that still need some manual interactions until finally you get large automated miners that you can connect with conveyor belts to other machines. The game is fairly well structured, with objectives guiding you through the massive number of things you can build and craft. You get to pick from a few milestones each ‘tier’ of the game, and you go between tiers by completing ‘space elevator’ projects, complex and time-consuming crafting scenarios that will challenge your math skills and the amount of time you are ready to waste.
That’s because Satisfactory is a game of optimization before everything else. You have iron ore nodes that produce 60 iron per second. Your smelters can smelt 30 per second, so you need two of them. You need to make iron plates, iron rods and screws. A machine can take 30 iron bars and produce 15 iron plates or 40 iron rods. You need 60 iron rods per second to create iron screws. How do you setup everything? Things just get more complex as the game goes on, and you get upgrades to boost the speed of buildings. When you have to make 500 of an item that is barely produced at a rate of 1 per minute, either you expand - a lot - you try to optimize all the steps of your factory so nothing is over or under-produced, or you wait. That can get a bit boring.
To add to the complexity of it all, you need to power all of your machines up. The first tier of electricity generation is based on burning bio-fuel (leaves, mostly) which is not infinite. You have to run around, picking up leaves and branches and burn them up to make your machines run. It adds a level of stress I’m not really enjoying to the early game, some items can only be made with machines and cannot be manually crafted, and you’ll want your factory to run in order to see if it works properly but running out of electricity is a valid concern, it doesn’t take too long before you get coal plants that rely on water pumps and coal miners to produce an infinite amount of power as the resources do not run out, but I wish we had some other options, like solar.
As the game continues, you expend into many different materials, getting to move fluids around with pumps, creating plastics and using the by-product oils to generate power and more complex items. In order to get all these materials, you need to go around the map, which is another rough thing in the game. The map is huge, filled with aggressive creatures and dangerous flora. You have a very small number of weapon and items to actually use to help you and the transportation options are also pretty limited, I wish there were good weapons, good armors, because dying and dropping all of your stuff gets old when you’ve been playing for over 40 hours. I love the idea of a big tube that carries you around, but you still have to lay it down from point A to point B. To transport resources, either you place a map-spanning conveyor belt, train tracks or you create a truck system and watch in despair as your trucks struggle to follow your directions. I wish there was a teleporter at some point. Make it use a ton of electricity, I don’t care, I just want to get around the map FAST.
Ultimately, the 3D nature of the game hurts it a bit. On one hand, it’s extremely cool to have verticality; to place conveyor elevators that move multiple levels of items around. To create multiple floors of factories, to stack containers and to go around terrain, but in practice, everything becomes a mess. It gets frustrating to place things around because angles always get too steep for some reason, adding splits and mergers requires quite a bit of precision and it simply isn’t fun. I’m not sure how they could make the game 3D, but also really easy to use and friendly. At least they allow you to place conveyor belts through other belts, otherwise that’d be an extra layer of annoyance.
I really liked Satisfactory! Playing it with friends seems like the way to go, even though the game is not complete yet and some bugs might occur here and there. I’m not too big on early access titles, so I can’t say for sure if I’ll play the game again when it’s out for real, but if you enjoy factory-building, automation and all that jazz, I certainly recommend Satisfactory wholeheartedly!
