Recent reviews by kumipuukko

Satisfactory seems to be a bit of "average on everything", has mixed in a little bit of some side-ideas that never got quite fully fleshed out, and the factory-building part is somewhat light-weight.
But still, its combination of exploration and building stuff somehow glues to it really well. Like 2000 hours -well. (Currently at 1886h, but I estimate minimum 500h more before I can let myself finish it. Oh wait, Ficsmas event probably adds about 100h to that..)

Definitely solidly on the thumbs up -side, if one likes building things in general.

For examples on the "averages" and "little side-ideas" etc:

It has aggressive monsters and some weapons to use against them, but, mostly the monsters can be either directly ignored, not being a real problem unless one stands still, or indirectly, by just building foundations a bit above. Only few things need a bit more than that, and even they can be permanently handled in a matter of minute or few. In my current playthrough, I haven't killed a single monster, I haven't even built the guns.

It has very obvious run-jump-climb "platformer" designs all over the world... but after about 15 minutes of playing, the "platforming" will be completely obsolete. And there is no need to go to those platforming places during those 15 minutes, or even first several hours, and most of those places need no visits ever.

There is a very thin story. And even that can be ignored, and one needs to pay attention to actually follow the story. Just follow the milestones and phases and few messages from the "AI" and the game gets completed.

The factory building is quite well made (though it _still_ has some old really annoying bugs), but compared to games that concentrate on factory building, Satisfactory doesn't really have that much of things (parts, buildings, recipes).

Positives:

The factory-side somehow has something that "just works" and keeps the interest up.

For me, it starts with the math and optimizations, designing placements and choices in order to have nice layouts while matching rates for optimal production. Mostly easy, but sometimes one can have quite nice calculation problems to solve. (If that isn't interesting, just get more resources from elsewhere and build more, brute-force past the problem.)

Also, maybe because unlike most factory games, one can design the buildable things so much more freely, and can combine generic building (looks, style) to the task. One maybe uses 10 minutes to run through the ignorable things, and maybe the factory stuff of the game could be finished in tens of hours if just pushing through... but somehow I end up using over 100h for just "minor adjustments" on my first small starter factory. Or after using 25 minutes to place a train track, spending 8 hours fine-tuning that already working train track so that it fits the environment better.

So, it is not just "factory building game", it is also "building game".

The exploration side of the game is also quite well made, combined with the nicely designed world, so the obligatory travels around it all aren't usually boring. And once it does get boring, one can build things that speed the travel up.

It has its bugs, flaws and other quirks, but with few+ players, plenty of fun was acquired already from one co-op playthrough. Be prepared for some restarts and relogins in multiplayer due to all kinds of weird glitches - which seem to be actively under fixing, so should be happening less and less in future.

The game does have a bit of learning hill in the begin, but half way through our campaign most of us had already learned most of what was needed and it was mostly smooth sailing. Hmm, smooth diving. And with smooth I mean amount of shaking, explosions, leaks, burning reactors, hallucinations, etc. was being managed without too many deaths. (Not counting assistant deaths, of course.)

NPCs are (or at least were) idiotic, but after a bit of trial and error, we managed to figure out what tasks and settings gave best results and least issues from them, and which tasks were best left to us humans.

Theme, game idea, and what needs to be done is fantastic.

But it is moderately spoiled by quite a few super-annoying bugs and flaws, many of which are in-your-face obvious and old. Wonder why they haven't gotten fixed yet; the developers must be aware of them, they are so obvious..

And, even worse, the duplicant (i.e. NPC) "AI" is a near perfect example of the other, more common explanation of the acronym, i.e. Artificial Idiocy. Basically, the (relatively small) collection of heuristic rules combined with the chosen (or randomly stumbled upon?) selection of game engine algorithms leads them duplicants doing mostly poor decisions. As one crude example, after setting their priorities correctly, having 6 dupes and one task to do, the game may end up selecting the worst duplicant for that task (furthest away, lowest priority, lowest skills). Manually prevent that dupe from doing it (e.g. by sending on useless run elsewhere, or blocking doors, or tweaking priorities to non-allowed), the game chooses the next bad dupe. Etc. etc. and the "right" duplicant gets selected only as the last choice. (This seems to be purely random, so not that bad every time, but you get the idea.)

That might at first sound as a minor occasional issue, no harm done, but no, similar poor,... nah, utterly idiotic decisions keep happening all the time (seems like it is more common for the game to do a bad choice than a good choice), and they can even lead to death(s) of duplicant(s).

Thus, duplicants get a huge benefit from being micro-managed. And with huge, I don't mean like average 20% more things done (and staying safe), but more like 10 times more things getting done. So, yeah, micro-management it is. But without proper micro-management toolset. The only direct duplicant command one can give is "move to" (which basically equals to a temporary "do nothing"). That is it. The rest the player needs to do by manipulating (lots and lots) of otherwise unneeded doors, and task priorities, etc, which needs huge load of work from the player. And some task priorities overlap in a way that makes some (rare) cases impossible to enforce the right way. So, an action setup that should be two or three clicks ("you, this, there") can often take 30 seconds to couple minutes to get right. And then after that is done, almost as much work to undo all those tweaks back to supposedly optimal normal setup. Of course, when it gets in the worse end of that spectrum, one tends to just go "whatever", if the colony is already in the state what such ignorance is acceptable.

The rest of the game would get 3/5 (5/5 if the bugs/flaws would get fixed), but the duplicant AI vs. micro-management hell is more like -4/5, and since it is (or should be) the core idea of the game...

.. No recommendation from me. I will possibly play (read: suffer) it through once to get most achievements, but unless I can find some mod that adds some sense to the game, that'll be it. Looking at my hours, one can deduce that I've tried it a "few" times, but stopped each time due to annoyance factor getting too high. I've learned some tricks to reduce the annoyances, but even then, way too many problems.

Basically, the game is (and apparently will stay) at mid alpha testing stage. Some balance issues, lots of bugs and lack of optimization, from insignificant cosmetic issues to major annoyances to game breaking ones. And even the game breaking ones are not rare; at the time of writing this, ~470 hours played, when I don't specifically restrict the things I do (that I already know to have high risk to cause problems), I have to "import game" almost daily. ("import" is a half working way to partially "reset" the ongoing game, keeping player's characters and buildings progress, in order to get rid of most of the bugged states, but also getting rid of some of the progress with the world, and giving possibly other new problems).

Reloads I do like every hour or two, and not because I did some mistake or took a too high risk, but because the game just ends up doing something totally stupid, e.g. character getting stuck after being pushed through a solid thing. Or the half-baked AI system going on an emergent down spiral to pure chaos of every local faction fighting almost every other local faction; hilarious once, but mostly near game breaking, and just annoying when it just keep happening again and again (i.e. after a reload and some more playing).

And many of the bugs and flaws are such that they would be easy and quick to fix; obvious mistakes in game logic, missing AI rules/conditions, simple incorrect values in item data, etc.

When it works and what works is quite good, plenty of playing to do - can easily spend hundreds of hours for single "play-through" - and the game would even have quite a lot of replay value. Without all those major bugs, this would be worth the 27€... but the bugs and flaws are so bad that I'd say its not worth above 10€, more like 5€, and the annoyances reduce the interest to go through another "play-through" a lot. I put the "play-through" in quotes, as this game does not have specific ending(s), per se (and that is not a bad thing).

I'm currently playing the game in a way of preparing for the "real play" a bit later, at first doing those imports as often as needed, and not doing anything significant to the rest of the world (which the import-reset would undo)... Once getting to a point where I'm mostly done with the character/building progress and having less need to visit towns etc., I'll try and continue to play without doing imports, in order to be able to actually progress with the rest of the world. Shall see if that plan will work out, and if I can get through my goals without getting to a game breaking state. In any case, this will be one try, and if it wont work, its an uninstall and forget.

"... slightly amusing, but mostly painful"

I think I have enough play hours to give my opinion, and the game is well in the maturity, not some unfinished beta (which would have the excuse for some things being still non-final, unfinished or needing spit and polish).

On the positive side, the concept is interesting, and so far I have not encountered any show-stopper level bugs.

But.

Way, way too many design flaws, bugs, and missing QoL improvements, considering how long this has been in development. Even worse, many of them have been reported/requested years ago, but developer either does not want to fix/implement them (for whatever reason), or doesn't care (ultra low priority), so for those issues there is no typical hope of them getting fixed even Soon(tm). Granted, many of the issues are minor, but another many of them are also so annoying that I rarely manage to play more than few hours before the annoyance grows higher than the enjoyment. And typically no more than a week of playing before I stop playing this for months.

I just calculated that my latest list of "bugs" (by my criteria, not by dev's) collected over past couple weeks has 28 entries, QoL list 20+, and I thought to report some of them... but found out many of them have already been reported/requested, long time ago, and some multiple times over the years. So, I won't bother; dev knows, but doesn't do anything for those issues. (Note, developer does actively fix some things, so this is definitely not an abandoned project! There is hope for some issues to be fixed some day/year.. but I don't have the patience to wait for another 5+ years.)

Yes. The base idea is good, so those who like over-complicated micromanagement, and can easily withstand mess, failures and imperfection... and/or...

... And/or those willing to handle the burden of juggling mods through version updates. There are tons of mods, some of which "fix" many of those annoying issues. I have tried to play with very minimal set of carefully selected mods (currently only two, have had few more in previous installation), and they have worked more or less ok even through updates.

Maybe a bit early opinion, not too many hours behind...
Anyway, very interesting and fun game, though maybe I'm getting old, so at times the required pace of actions is a bit too much for me. Of course, retrying the same thing a few times, and it gets easier, but I'm starting to dislike games where one has to learn to do things semi-automatically, quickly and accurately. (And instead, start liking games where I can use pause to get that right menu up for selecting right menu choice and to place it at the right pixel with good time...)
I still give it thumbs up, since overall it falls on the side of fun.

Tons of potential, but quite a bit of work left to do, and not just polishing. Plenty of bugs, some minor, some annoying, some almost (only almost) showstoppers, but I haven't yet seen any I'd say to be critical. And seems that the developers are quite actively fixing bugs. User interface looks ok'ish, but its usability is bad, very bad, to the point of needing a full redesign/rewrite (IMHO).

As an example on the usability: I had already done certain action with the UI multiple times (in tutorials)... I did something else in the game for maybe half an hour, and then had to do that one action again. Took me about 10 minutes to figure out how/what needed to pressed/clicked to get it done. And that was just one example, there's plenty more similar level problems with the UI. Certainly, given enough playtime, I will learn and remember all the details, but UI design has evolved past that "memorize 100+ keys and states and except not in this mode -quirks" 25 years ago, except not in this game.

The possibilities in designing one's own vessels and structures (if one can ignore that UI experience), the physics of the combat, etc. seem to be good and interesting. Certainly matches my build-then-destroy-and-get-destroyed interests very well. The combat style of watching shells fly for 10+ seconds before hitting target (or missing it...), and waiting another 10 seconds for the systems preparing the next volley, and making ship turns that take 20 seconds or more to complete, are somehow more entertaining than e.g. the 100+ clicks per minute clickmare games or 0.05 second reaction time first person shooter games. One has much more time to think strategies, or simply just watch and enjoy big booms...

And the design part of the game is almost a game in itself. They call certain sub-task in the weapons design "tetris" for a good reason. While the parts don't fall down over time, it is still a difficult and interesting challenge. "I am pretty sure I can still squeeze one more ammo loader in that turret..." or "Maybe I can make that turret neck 2 blocks narrower if I move..." and suddenly it is the next morning and that turret became 2 blocks bigger instead. But its weapons make twice the damage now! If they hit..

If the bugs are fixed, and the usability improved (a lot), this will likely be in my top 10. At its current state, it is perhaps somewhere in the lower parts of top 30. But since I have played too much of the better ones, this will certainly be getting plenty of playing hours for now...

My evaluation is "early beta, maybe ready in one year (i.e. 2021)". Most certainly not a "Q2 2020" thing :P Seems to be worth the price, though.

Update 2022: Polishing has happened, though some annoyances still remain, especially with the UI.. but given the interest in building things, this game still lures to the morning hours. And, gives a relatively decent exercise in somewhat natural physics (effects of center of mass, buoyancy, off-center forces, etc.)

Plenty of fun for a while... but difficulty level / imbalance is waaayyy out of the graph, and depends a LOT on RNG (i.e. luck). (EDIT: And after plenty of development and few rechecks from me, I'll leave that sentence and thumb down as the final short review.)

For example, in one run all the wands I found on the first leg were basically variants of the initial attack wand, so no real progress from those. And they were all somewhat deep in that part. All the way in the 11th run I got my first wand that was capable of starting fires, which is at times quite the essential ability, and that spell had limited charges, so not really good to spend in fights. In only one run I have found black hole (or some such) wand, and then I found two of them in that same one, which means some possibly more useful wand lost its chance to appear.

Or meet a fiery difficult monster almost immediately entering the mine, with no water around... pretty much a show stopper. But on another run I bumped into 3 of the same almost at the same time... certain death?... Nah, plenty of water nearby that time, so it was a matter of choosing which way to approach, no need to even shoot.

Basically, if you're lucky, and get the right things in the begin, it is easy and fun (at least as far as I have managed to get, which isn't that far :P), but if the lady Luck is against you, you'll get no useful wands and all the ground will get covered in toxic/acid, which means quick death. WTB toxic proof boots.

Even the cruel RNG might be less affecting if the player had some ways to adapt or change things during the spelunking, but nope, no changing wand spells, or healing until at the holy mountain.

So, it has really nice potential, but its not there yet. In its current state it is more like glorified coin toss sequence; if you get heads, continue to next phase and another coin toss, but if you get tails, die and start from the begin again. No recommendation from me as it is. I hope to remember to revisit my recommendation if the balance improves or rng-dependency reduces.

I'll still play it some, as I want to figure out some of the, hmm, weirder things I've found.

Players who like hardcore ironman -style with fast restart rate should definitely pick this one up. ;)

EDIT: now the player has one bottle of water right from the start, which makes a big difference for that particular issue. However, as an example, my latest run did not have any wands whatsoever at the first "level". So, still a "no".

EDIT 2: As I finally get a bit further in the game, even more silly things happen, like gods getting angry in a way where I didn't do anything, and could not have stopped it by doing something; the "emergent" behavior of various monsters just leads to it.

EDIT 3: Now the start gear is somewhat random... which means that the very useful water bottle might be something much less useful, or even completely useless. And the attack wand can also be a much less effective variant. Some of the more direct balance issues have been adjusted, but the main ones are still there. Otherwise awesome game mechanisms, but the big issues leave it all spoiled. So, even still a "no".

This will be my last update to this review, as obviously the game devs are either clueless about certain basic game development 101 "rules", or have chosen to ignore them.

Quite a nice game. Similar (but not the same) in game play as the previous in series, Creeper World 3. That is, if one liked the previous game, this one should also be enjoyable. The enemy "AI" seems to be a bit nastier in this one. Not really smart, per se, but makes some (initially unexpected) reactions that do give some challenge at times.

The first story/campaign was a little bit on the easy side for me, especially the first missions. Perhaps due to the "training" from the Creeper World 3, which had much more challenging missions. Most campaign scenarios have somewhat tight start, but after that, it is more about figuring out which target can be destroyed next and how to do it, without getting defenses broken elsewhere. I got through the campaign in about 20 hours on first try, but I also didn't try to rush to victory, instead taking time to clean out everything in each map before finishing. Could have saved maybe couple hours...

But then the second campaign ("Inception") started with quite the challenge. Took me more than hour of being in stalled situation to figure out to sacrifice a ship or two and other tricks to buy time for the weaker ships to do their work, in order to advance one step, and then withdraw to re-stabilize before making the next push. In a situation where even the support ships were being used for their weak attack power just to keep steady, and still sometimes needing to take a temporary step back, sacrificing one of the biggest offensive ships was definitely not an easy idea. That is the kind of challenge I like. (I have not yet continued in Inception, maybe it will have easier missions, maybe harder..)

Even if all that sounds like a lot of hectic work, the game scenarios seem to be such that only the begin period and some of the pushes forward need a bit more carefully timed activity, which can be done in pause mode if wanted. And of course, thinking out the solutions to each problem can be done in pause, with plenty of time. Not that the first solution ideas always work anyway :P This game type suits me better than the clickmare strategy games.

Definitely worth it when at discount, the normal price (at this time) is on the edge for my taste.

Plenty of bugs still slapping to the face like a dead fish, some quite serious bugs, even... But the way it gives its atmosphere, eh, fluidsphere(?) is nice enough to overcome those annoyances most of the time.

It is somewhat short/slim game overall, depending on the play style, but hey, diving time at around few thousand tanks of oxygen (more than 270 hours of play time), and while I have reached almost all the places and gotten the materials and blueprints needed, I'm still not ready to finish it, "have to" get some "little" things to be built and tried first...