Recent reviews by Lelden

If you are analytical and mildly obsessive (two qualities that never go together right?) then don’t buy this game.* On the surface it’s a game about launching a rocket, but it really only about that the same way Minecraft is about defeating an Ender Dragon. And to boot, in Factorio you can keep launching rockets as much as you want. (*this assumes you still want free time in your life and enjoy interpersonal interactions outside of talking about proper ratios and setups)

It starts out simple enough. You are stranded on this other planet, so why not make the best of it? You can somehow craft gears and circuits with your hands, mine ore with your pickaxe (don’t forget to make one at the start). To mine ore faster and use it you need to build some miner drills and furnaces as well as other things. A lot of these items are quickly made, but then you start to get to items that take longer. After you hook up some electricity from some steam generators and you start to do the basic research you can start making these assembly machines. That’s where it gets insidious and the true dark nature of the game is revealed. You see, these assembly machines can make stuff for you. The quick stuff and the long stuff. Input the materials and it will work its magic and output the products. You start to realize that even the quick materials you need a lot of, so using the assembly machines to make a lot of them for you sounds like a good idea. And don’t forget you need to move the ore from the mining drills to the furnaces and take those materials and move them to the assembly machines and perhaps even take some of those products and move them to more assembly machines, so you have to make more machines to do that for you.

Well by now you’ve done a bit more research so you have better items you can make, and better ways to arrange things, and besides your little factory will work better if you move this assembly machine over there so you don’t get all the items tied up on these moving belts along the way so you might as well remake a few things.

An hour or two later and you’ve made yourself a factory that you just now realize is a mess and probably way too tightly packed together (you need to find a way to move this line of electronic circuits over there and there just isn’t room...you just might be able to fandangle it and not move half your base, but you will have to redo three lines of belts and maneuver some inserters around so you can get the underground belts in just the right place to make it through).

Then, just after everything looks amazing the worst thing happens... Your third science pack setup isn’t making as many as many science packs as you need. You put down two more assemblers just to realize that it isn’t the number of assemblers that is the problem... you just need more engine units. You fix that setup (having to move just a fifth of your base, because you were smart and spread out way more than you thought you would... but still you needed a bit more even so), just to realize that now that it is working efficiently, your advanced circuit setup isn’t getting enough iron (you had to split off an iron line from it to go to your engine unit setup so now there isn’t enough). You spend twenty minutes setting up more mining drills on ore patches, pushing back some of the native aliens (oh, did I forget the aliens? Yeah, there are aliens that hate anything that makes pollution, that includes about half of what you are doing and that half supports the other half, by the way), work through your smelting setup to find a bit more room in your too crowded setup (who the heck would have thought you only needed that much room? You’re going to need a bit more), put down more transport belts, which you definitely need to think hard to find where put them to work (why the heck had I laid out these belts this way in the first place?), and eventually get it all setup. It’s at that point that you realize it wasn’t your iron production that was backing things up with your advanced circuits... it was your plastic bar production.

Pretty soon you’re skipping meals, your family is wondering if you’re still alive, and you’re too busy trying to figure out the best nuclear power setup so you can finally get rid of all that bulky solar power that takes up waaay too much space. That gets done in between expanding your base, finding new resource patches, fighting those pesky aliens (that get stronger over time, ha!), balancing your crude oil production because you never have enough petroleum, getting another science pack setup going (how am I possibly going to fit this new one? It needs processing units batteries and speed modules!), finding out why your trains are stuck this time (oh yeah, the game has trains and flying robots too), and trying to reorder your base for the eighteenth time after you realized for the twentieth time how inefficient it is ... and you’re having a blast all the way.

Best pre-release I’ve ever bought, and the Devs aren’t done yet. Feel free to wait for release if you’re burnt out on pre-releases, but this game is more done than most games out there. The updates keep just making it better.