This game is 100% budget Satisfactory. EXCEPT: The game auto load balances everything for you. The most efficient way to play is to create a giant loop with multiple lanes and connect everything to it and then it will perfectly balance itself. This means that while this advertises itself as a factory game the core features that we have come to expect from factory games (namely the need to even a little math) is completely missing. That combined with everything being on the same level (no second floors), everything being locked to a global grid, everything being locked to one of the 4 cardinal directions for rotation, everything having fixed footprints, and resources not being transferable between bases factory layout design is so restrictive it's barely even a thing. You don't get to make any real decisions about where things go.

That being said the game is overall decently fun. I'd give it a solid 3/5, but because it's only $20 I'll bump that up to a 4/5. The map size and complexity is okay, the dialogue and writing are okay, the gunplay is okay (a melee weapon would REALLY help with those tiny bugs getting too close), the control mapping is buggy but will likely get fixed. Other than the control mapping I have found no other bugs.

I don't like comparing games to each other, but this game is so completely a copy of satisfactory in every way that I feel I must. This game is baby's first satisfactory. The story is better, but the writing is worse, the combat and exploration are worse, they way you unlock things feels worse, and everything related to the factory is worse. The world periodically resetting feels more like a game mechanic than like a cool event and collecting things every reset VERY quickly starts to feel like you're doing chores.

Here's what I would change:
1) Make it clear where you get blueprints from. There NEEDS to be a tutorial for this. I still have no idea, I just happened to find 1 and it's not the one I need.
2) Add turrets and base defense against enemy hordes much earlier in the game. Honestly, this is the thing that will set this game apart and make it actually feel like its own game instead of budget Satisfactory. There's already a big focus on combat here, so lean into that. Also, it's a niche that isn't being effectively filled. As far as I'm aware there aren't any really good 3D factory / base defense games on the market right now.
3) Add food and water to the main HUD.
4) Give us a hot-bar.
5) Fix weapon controls. We need a quick, single press way to put things away. Right now it's REALLY obnoxious when you accidentally tap F and pull out your deconstructor.
6) Make sprint infinite. Stamina bars aren't fun in a game like this, they're just annoying. Sprint is already slow enough.
7) Add difficulty settings. This will be important if you lean into the base defense aspect as players all want different size hordes attacking the stuff they've built.

I think this game has potential, and I do recommend people pick it up, just maybe wait a while until the game has developed more.

As always, I preface I have over 10,000 hours of Open World Survival Crafting genre gameplay, and the aim of my reviews are to simply paint a more clear picture of what you are getting into.

6 hours of gameplay at the time of this review:

Pros:
- Open world is somewhat interesting and large.
- Well optimized for the most part, only had a couple lag spikes here and there at understandable times.
- There is not a constant pressure to find oxygen nor food every 5-10 minutes. In fact, there's no way to run out of oxygen at all, and eating and drinking doesn't annoy you constantly. Although, I am a big fan of Open World Survival Crafters, I am not a fan of being annoyed every 10 mins about needing to eat or drink. This game gives you a bit more time, and it feels just right.
- All systems and operable structures seem to work well as per their design.
- I actually think the pacing is quite nice, right where it should be for needing to figure out how to be more efficient without just handing you a free rewards all the time.

Cons:
(I will change/delete these if I discover it was solved or found in game later)

- The Sound
....what on earth....apparently as a host, you can hear your friend blowing up nodes of ore that sound like it is directly behind you, yet, they are 500+ meters away. And, the characters have pretty loud conversations with each other, and you can hear the other player's character talking right in your ear as if they are right next to you even if they are far away from you (including characters not even current in the game?! Odd). The way sound travels in the game is very very odd and annoying.

- No actual character advantages/disadvantages?
There seems to be no clear advantage to choosing any character....this disappointed me quite a bit, I like having individuated differences in coop/multiplayer games that encourages people to work together, valuing their strengths and weaknesses; but I have yet to find any actual advantages and/or disadvantages to using any character (even though it states there are).

- Text Size:
This wasn't an issue for me, but a friend of mine and others in the reviews have complained about needing an option for change text size to a larger size due to not being able to see it. It wasn't an issue for me, I have good eye sight, so I'll mention it due to the game being in EA so a fix can hopefully occur. And no, changing one's resolution isn't an acceptable permanent solution, especially if you've invested in playing in 4k.

- Product Overproduce
Each manufacturing station has a sort of X/100 preliminary storage for when and if there is a delay in the manufacturing line. Great idea at first, until I realized, every time I set up my manufacturing line to produce a certain product, it actually makes 100 excess of said product than it needs per manufacturing line built. 6+ hours in, I see no way to be able to recycle said materials, or perhaps a way to select how many of said product I want delivered as ordered. You CAN technically use those products for other upgrades, etc, however, the numbers are always off, and if you are like myself and don't like spending excess material on excess product and then having to organize your storage based on overproduction of said manufactured product, then that might drive you nuts. I get the idea, that the excess will be used later on for research potential, but I am a very organized person, and I don't like having unused product sitting around in my base or clogging up assembly/manufacturing lines, especially when the storage and inventory management in the game is subpar at best. Not a game breaking thing, but it is annoying to me as I feel like I always have to go in and sort of "unclogged" the assembly lines every time I need to change the product type (and it changes a lot due to game design).

- Inventory/Storage Management:
Inventory and storage management is a bit mediocre, and placing store chests is horrible... It seems you can't stack them nor rotate them in order to be more efficient with space. They do rotate, but they rotate as if their center is on the outside, put simply, rotating the storage chest makes a square, and not a cross. Hard to explain, but annoying and not space friendly.

- Combat is mediocre and basic, it's not bad, it's just....very simple and there's not a lot of options.

- Lots of issues with placing structures as if they are going to clip another whilst it is no where near another structure.

Conclusion:

I do recommend this game at this time (which is rare for me to say of an EA game these days). This game has good pacing, decent graphics, interesting mechanics, and an interesting combination of open world survival crafting mixed with assembly line manufacturing. It is honestly impressive for EA. if you like Open World Survival Crafters and Assembly line games (Like Satisfaction) then you will most likely enjoy this game. This game has huge potential.

Be well.

I put a few hours into StarRupture and I think I’m done for now. There are some interesting ideas here, but structurally the game doesn’t hold together.

At its current stage, it feels very early and in need of significant rework. Right now it’s essentially a factory game where the optimal strategy is to erase the world’s relevance as quickly as possible, then ignore it as much as the terrain allows.

The core problem is logistics. Resources use autonomous pathing (routing, not delivery), which removes player intent from material flow. You can congest a rail, but it’s trivial and inexpensive to add more rails, so congestion never becomes a meaningful constraint. Once something is on the network, topology largely stops mattering.

Height limits on construction remove vertical expression, which might have compensated for that, but the buildings aren’t stackable. The only rational approach left is to flatten the factory footprint entirely. That turns terrain into a pure inefficiency tax: once a flat, homogenized surface is established, you quickly converge on a single “best” layout with no meaningful room for improvement. After that point, terrain doesn’t add decisions or tradeoffs; it just slows progress.

The base defense layer is where things really fall apart. The factory topology the game enforces is necessarily large, flat, and sprawling. That makes efficient defense geometrically impossible. The perimeter of any viable base quickly exceeds render and engagement ranges, meaning enemies effectively appear inside the defensive envelope. No amount of turret tuning or placement can fix this, since that's a spatial problem, not a balance one. Defense either becomes trivial once turrets are unlocked, or meaningless at scale.

As a result, the game ends up in an awkward middle ground: the factory systems are simpler and less expressive than other factory games, and the defense systems are too underdeveloped to carry the experience. Multiplayer doesn’t meaningfully change this, since there’s nothing the game demands that can’t be accomplished solo. Multiplayer therefore becomes a less efficient parallelized version of single-player.

The flare-star concept is visually striking, but mechanically underutilized. At the moment it mostly functions as a periodic pause rather than a system that meaningfully interacts with logistics, layout, or defense.

Bottom line: there’s effectively a single rational factory layout that scales infinitely, and the engine struggles at the scale the game pushes you toward, long before the endgame structures make an appearance. Fixing this would require rethinking core assumptions about logistics, verticality, or defense.
Not just adding content or tweaking numbers.

I'll certainly revisit it later if those foundations change, but as it stands, there isn’t much to solve here.