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A casual factory building game with minimal combat elements focused on adapting a planet into one giant factory.
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This game sat in early access for most of a decade and I intentionally didn't review it during early access. It was already getting enough positive reviews and I wanted to be sure it made it into full release with adequate fixes before saying anything. I did play nearly 100 hours in EA before deciding to wait for full release. So yes, the ideas were all there, but it sat needing a lot of updates for a very long time.
Then it released into 1.0 and I found myself too busy playing it to write a review. 50 hours later, here I am writing one. That in itself should serve as a positive note. The game, for what it is, has immersive and even addictive qualities. Assuming this is your genre, because it is very much a niche and despite being good it's not going to be for everyone.
Let me get this out of the way first, if you're looking for a clean, simple, no distractions type of factory game; let me suggest: Shapez.
What satisfactory brings is something beyond that with a huge world to explore and interact with. You can find yourself lost in the landscape or trying to figure out the best path to bring iron over a mountain to where you need it. There's a framework of a story that sits in the background egging you on to build more and more automation as new recipes and machines unlock and let you exploit more variety of the planets resources.
It's a world you can almost live in, though some of it is hostile to you. Survival game players may see some aspects of that hinted at here, but the survival and combat are on a purely casual level. You can turn off hostile animals if you don't want to fight them and even if you do fight they are pretty simple and repeated patterns. And while food exists for healing there's no eating/drink requirements; so the tedium of survival is not a gameplay element other than trying not to fall off a cliff to your doom.
Basically when you get an itch to explore, you can and there's enough variety to be interesting for a few hours. But the meat of the game is in the scope of building and exploiting the planets resources. The scale you're building at eventually branches out over miles starting with simple conveyor belts and working up through trucks, drones and even trains to deliver production results. You start generating power from burning grass as you clear fields for your factories and work up through coal, oil and eventually even nuclear power plants.
The tier unlock system gives a sense of progress and hints at what you should be doing next after getting stable at each new milestone.
It's a job that doesn't feel like a job and that's about the best praise I can give to what is sometimes a rather tedious genre.
I could come up with complaints; but most are easily dismissed:
*There's no world generation. You have just one map to play on
- Counter point: That map is huge (47 square kilometers or 18 square miles) and it's hand crafted, so there's a lot of hidden caves and interesting bits to explore.
*There's only a few enemy types in the game
-Counter point: This isn't a game about combat, the enemies exist as part of the hostile alien landscape and are more of an obstacle to overcome while building a factory. They are in fact so minimally important to the story that you can optionally make them all passive so you don't fight at all and it still feels like mostly the same game.
*There's no terrain deformation
-Counter point: This is one of the only real challenges of the game. You can clear plant life, there's some rocks you can blow up, but the base landscape is your true nemesis and adapting your factory around it (or on platforms above it) is the bulk of the gameplay. This simply isn't Minecraft or 7 Days to Die, it's its own thing and the crafted landscape you overcome is part of that presentation.
I feel like I'm reaching to try and find complaints and while the game isn't perfect, it fills a distinct void in gaming somewhere between the typical exploration and combat that is pretty common in games and the more distinctly puzzle purity of games like Shapez or even Factorio.
It's just a different kind of challenge, if you're up for it, and you can tackle it casually at whatever pace you want to go.
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Bottom line: This is what happens when you turn an excel spreadsheet into an explorable planet.
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