Satisfactory

I said no more early access games, and here we are, but to my credit this is one of those “never done” sort of games that trucks along in EA for years and is, in its current state, a complete experience.

Satisfactory is a sci-fi factory automation game with a first-person exploration. I felt like this was a pretty good middle place in the genre between the lower-key factory games and the grand pappy (you know who). The tutorial and barebones story has a corporate dark humor sci-fi tone similar to Journey to the Savage Planet and the Outer Worlds. You’re dropped onto an uninhabited planet with instructions to build… and build… and build. The majority of the game centers around collecting resources to unlock more tools and factory parts, and using those items to create factories so you can harvest or craft more quickly. The exploratory component comes into play more when you are trying to find new materials to unlock resource branches. Once you’ve found a resource, you can scan for it after that, which helps a lot.

My number one issue is I have a lot of difficulty building things from the ground. It can be tough to line things up correctly, leading to a lot of disassembly/reassembly. I wish this game had a top-down view or a build mode or something that made this easier. Evidently a lot of people use flying mods to get around this, and the game has a flying mode in advanced settings. I’m not quite ready to go there. Building foundations helps a lot, and I’m trying to get better about that.

My second issue is even the smallest factory is freaking HUGE, and running around between massive machines drives me slightly bananas.

My first game, I hit tier 2 and became highly dissatisfied with my weird snakey factory layout, as well as the need to contantly dig up biomatter to feed the five or so burners I used to run it. I read advice that starting out you should focus on handcrafting until you power your way to coal, and I decided to try that for my next game on a Grassy planet. I also toggled animal hostility off, since the game doesn’t really provide very good tools or frankly good enough play control to warrant running around shocking alien hogs with a spanner.

Second game went a little better, but I got bored of handcrafting everything. The main benefit of factories is multi-tasking. You can craft things faster at the workbench, but you can only craft one thing at a time and you can’t do anything else while you’re crafting. Setting up assembly lines to produce concrete, for example, removes some of that tedium.

I’m honestly not sure if I like this game or not. The things I didn’t like about Assembly Planter (the grinding, the sprawling automation) are multiplied here, since this is a much more expansive game. I like automation, but I don’t necessarily like some of the gameplay aspects that come with that. I stopped playing this game before I’d set up a coal generator, which is an automated power source, and I think that would help. I’m sure I’ll return to this one eventually.