Recent reviews by Harbo5

My productivity at work has seen a measurable decline, thanks Wube. The factory must grow.

Update: It pains me to leave this review because I like Wube and I don’t think I could’ve done any better. The game still runs flawlessly and I’ve seen extremely few bugs, which are things we should reward, but this DLC is a mess. I have 200+ hours with a late game base producing ~4kspm, and I feel defeated more than anything else. The DLC adds tons of content, but it's wildly disorganized, conflicts with the spirit of other content, and utterly fails to form a cohesive system. The game has become a mess of separate supply chains, half of which are by design impossible to cleanly automate. When I started my play through, Gleba frustrated me the most, but I powered through. I regret doing so, as I've come to realize it's not even that bad compared to some of the fundamental design failures in this DLC.

Fulgora is a complete miss for me. It was fun for an hour, and not a big deal to setup the science I need for my first research. I promptly left and it was fine for a while. Then came time to try to scale. It took me close to 8 hours in editor mode (needed to use it to test throughput because it'd often take 30+ minutes before it'd break, so increasing speed was critical to test) to even get a semi-functional 1kspm production. It required me to produce tons of the insanely expensive foundation from Aquillo because it's impossible to build any serious builds on the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up landscape that is Fulgora's islands. On top of that, you need to place 10s of thousands of accumulators, which, even with robots and map blueprint placements is just a massive pain in the ass. Unlike Nauvis and solar panels, where you can just mindlessly plop them on free space, Fulgora's ♥♥♥♥♥♥ landscape makes tiling impossible unless you want to waste thousands of foundation paving everything, which is completely infeasible until you're 100+ hours into a save.

Quality is horrible and by far my least favorite addition, it ruined this DLC more than anything else for me. Anytime before the late game, it's wildly inefficient to use quality because of the insane ratios without productivity research and the late-game gating of quality levels. Even once you make it to the late game and have all the resources in the world, endlessly running blue circuits and LDS through recycles is boring and extremely tedious. Since the geniuses at Wube made recyclers based on RNG, you cannot have perfect ratios. If the RNG swings too much, your build will inevitably stop. With one quality, it's not a big deal, but when you're trying to upcycle blue circuits for example, and the games decides to output 3x green circuits than red circuits in what's supposed a balanced process, it just becomes a complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess. You end up with like 15 different recycling chains just for one block of production. It's the same reason spoilage sucks, you can't just make something and forget it. Every single setup you make in the DLC needs to deal with production chains that are impossible to ratio correctly, so you will always have excess. It's cool as a thought puzzle for a few hours at best, and after that every single build becomes a slog of having do deal with all the ♥♥♥♥ you don't want. Yes, you can just dump it in recyclers, but it takes up tons of space, power, and math since there's no easy way to estimate how many recyclers you need downstream without serious calculations. I shouldn't need a graphing calculator pulled up to play the game.

This DLC fundamentally upends the reason I liked Factorio, it was an optimization puzzle with solutions, many solutions, but solutions. Spoilage, recycling, and quality all throw that core gameplay principle out the window in favor of impossible-to-balance, RNG based ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I never played Space Age when it was a mod, but I was an avid fan of Bob's & Angel's. I have zero qualms with the added complexity of the DLC, it still pales compared to a Bob+Angel or Pyro playthrough, but those mods were extremely successful in adding complexity to the game without destroying (what I saw as) the core design principals of the game. It’s Wube's game, and clearly they felt this RNG ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ was an improvement and such design principals were best left behind. I don't like it and I don't understand it, but that's their prerogative.

Factorio was (definitely not anymore) a game where every solution worked, some were slower than others, but you could make it work. You didn't need perfect ratios, you didn't need to use a calculator to understand where to start, you didn't need to use ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ calculus to try to estimate how much deviation in outputs you need to anticipate in your recycling setup. A game that was already somewhat unfriendly to new players is now borderline unplayable without online guides. I tried to play with Googling, something you could easily do before, but because the developers expect me to read their mind and understand the very specific way to intended for a mechanic to be used, you're punished incredibly and will ultimately fail. A perfect example of this are the insane, a non-sensical interstellar shipping limits. Want to ship the resources for 2000 rocket ammo? No problem, takes 8 rockets. Want to send 2000 assembled ammo? How about 80 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rockets. That's not a joke, the cost to send assembled ammo is actually 10x. This is one of many examples where the developers where too lazy to balance the game around multiple play styles as the vanilla game did, and instead just implemented arbitrary caps or inconvenience so you play the game "the intended way”, or some of the similarly arbitrary crafting or placement location limits. It’s asinine and lazy design.

Separate of all my design complaints, there's unironically too much content. I admittedly don't have a solution for this either, I don't think making a Factorio 2 out of this would've been any better, but most of my friends abandoned their playthroughs well before the end and several quit shortly after departing Nauvis and realizing they basically had to start over. There is just way too much to digest. Having to rebuild basic production 4 times with varying levels of tedium is not fun or engaging for casual players. Even as a very dedicated player, I grew greatly annoyed with how many times I had to rebuild huge portions of my infrastructure to facilitate some new interstellar shipping or whatever. I hope this will get better with time as the community comes up with up blueprints.

tl;dr: Recycling and quality are RNG slop that never should've been added. Space logistics is completely neutered and un-engaging because the devs felt the game should be played a specific way and were too lazy to balance around multiple strategies (see Dyson Sphere Project for a game with functioning interstellar logistics). At its core, the DLC fundamentally destroys the design principals I felt made Factorio the game it is and even as a veteran player I found it to essentially be a mishmash of mods slapped together in a DLC. Just buy the base game and get mods.

Space Age is what is. They added lots of content, and I don’t think they should remove or even necessarily change all this stuff I just complained about; it’s just not for me. I will not be playing Space Age again. The base game with turbo belts, stack inserters, and elevated rails is plenty of an improvement for me.

I'll also caution others from writing reviews of content they haven't had time to fully digest (as I and many others did).

Great game to relax with. Very well made and well designed. It offers a unique combination of gameplay. Would definitely recommend

This is not priced appropriately. It's the same price as the base game and it's a fraction of the content. If the developers want to provide avenues for people to support them, they should release more cosmetics, not gouge people on content DLC prices.

It's disappointing, because the content is good, but no one will enjoy it at this price. I'm glad the developers changed their mind and now at least they allow you to share the DLC with other players, but that doesn't justify the DLC costing as much as the base game.

This game does not have an auto-save option, which is extremely anti-player. It's perfectly fine to offer an ironman mode for games, I think it's great for people who have the time to lose their progress. Some of us, however, do not have the luxury of playing games indefinitely, and when you lose large portions of your valuable time to a game crash because some developer was too lazy to implement auto-save, it's incredibly deflating. I realize I can save manually, but I am software engineer myself and I hate to see developers force their principals (no auto save for "immersion", ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ joke) at the detriment of users.

An excellent game. but one tainted by egomania.

An excellent indie RTS/city builder title. It's a unique spin on the traditional RTS game with lots of variety from game to game. Very good value for the money, there's tons of content left and I'm already 50 hours in. Goes to show how low the standard for AAA games has become, this is a great example of what an early access game should be. It's significantly more polished than a lot of the garbage EA and company have released recently.

The driving mechanics ruin the game for me. It’s like every car is slapped on top of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ice rink.

♥♥♥♥ you 2K, stop bloating old games you data-hungry ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Not a bad game, but a bad port. Controls are unintuitive and clunky, there UI was clearly designed for a console. and the options are lacking. Unrelated to the PC version, I found the voice acting to be atrocious. It's so bad for side characters that it almost sounds like an AI voice; it destroys the emersion of the game.

Paradox needs to improve their QA department. Wait a couple months for balance fixes.

EDIT: they have fixed most of the bugs, solid enough add-on now. Not as good as others, but adds some decent mechanics that will impact a variety of play styles. Switched form neg to positive.

Half the game is the kid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and the other half is poorly executed Dark Souls. I am honestly confused by how well received this game is, I just don't get it.