Factorio

[h1]I don't think that anyone reading a review should play Factorio.[/h1] At this point, especially given the game's popularity, if you don't already know if Factorio is going to be for you or not, then it probably isn't. I can imagine someone getting recommended this game but then discovering that it's a complete slog for them. And I'm going to try and articulate why. [h3]Learning Curve? What's that?[/h3] There's a lot of brick walls of apparent complexity that can feel incredibly daunting when you first arrive at them, and I would surmise that a large majority of people who didn't enjoy Factorio came to that conclusion at one of those moments. It's pretty common knowledge among most Factorio players that chemical science, with it's brand new buildings and fluids and oil processing and whatnot, is the first major hurdle to getting [i]invested[/i] in Factorio. I don't know how much the tutorial has advanced since the game's earlier days, but I don't even think a good tutorial would make it any more approachable. The annoying thing is that, in isolation, nothing in Factorio is [i]that[/i] hard to understand. On the surface level, there's no singular mechanic that causes players grief. However, the amalgamation of all the systems coming together is what makes the game the beast that it can become. The biggest example I can point to of that are the ratios of inputs/outputs. There are very few [i]intuitive[/i] ratios in this game. It's not easy 1:2 or 3:4 ratios across the board, and even once you understand these ratios, there's dozens of possible bottlenecks that you have to iterate over to find any problems that come up in your factory, which can start to feel overwhelming fairly quickly. As I play and see other games that were inspired by Factorio, they do far, far better jobs not only introducing players to their mechanics, but also making those mechanics themselves interact in a cleaner way. Shapez 2 comes to mind as a game that took everything that's satisfying about Factorio and streamlined it for a more casual audience. And for those players who want that, Factorio isn't going to cut it for you. Factorio is not going to hold your hand at any point throughout the game, and there's a lot of people, myself included, that appreciate that aspect of it. You almost certainly will need to do "research" into Factorio to get the most out of it, and for some that's a huge dealbreaker. The question "how many green circuits should I build and where should I build them?" has a million answers and caveats that the game has little to no interest in answering for you, as that's a question you both need to be able to and willing to solve for yourself. [h3]You, specifically, need to let go.[/h3] If you're like me and consume a lot of Factorio content on YouTube, you'll be aware of the incredible designs people can come up with when given hundreds of hours to play this game. However, you, as a normal human person, will not get that experience. There's a reason that the top players of this game are making videos: one of the only ways to make a factory worth showing is by treating this game like a job. They're doing genuine research, planning, and deep analysis of bottlenecks and production pipelines- heck, here's a true story: I aced my Productions and Operations university-level course back when I was in college just because I'd played Factorio for over two hundred hours and understood all the concepts before we even were taught them, this game is on that kind of level. All that to say if you're a more casual player, you're going to need to accept a lot of flaws. You're not going to have the most compact base, you're not going to be making thousands of science per minute, and you'll likely have to AFK a few times to finish up a research or two at one point. Biters will kill you, you'll have to reload saves, and you'll probably start over from the beginning multiple times. And that doesn't happen in the YouTube videos, now doesn't it!? See, there's nothing [i]actually[/i] stopping you from making "spaghetti bases" aside from people on the internet. Even if you're cooking spaghetti, at least you're cooking something. Just look at any official marketing info from the Factorio devs, it's spaghetti all the way down. So save scum, steal blueprints off the internet, don't be afraid to outsource the parts of the game you struggle with. Stay away from trying to make perfectly optimized designs that neatly fit into grids, especially not on your first attempt. Just slap the buildings down wherever they fit and route those random belts and train lines wherever they happen to fall into place. Once you start doing this, I promise the game becomes 10x more enjoyable, and you'll find yourself with a far more productive factory than if you were trying to make it perfect. I tried desperately to make a beautiful, modular base, and it tanked hard. Don't be like how I was, become enlightened like I am now. /halfjoking [h3]Get in loser, we're growing the factory.[/h3] Honestly, the Factorio experience is one of exponential, self-driven progress that will almost always give you back what you put in tenfold. It's a game where you can never truly stop learning and growing in how you approach it, and that's not even including the bazillion mods and Space Age DLC. There's a reason so many games went on to say it was inspired by Factorio, and there's also a reason that so many of the people who played it keep coming back for more.

I am coming to this from Satisfactory. I also work in supply chain management for my day job. Take everything I am about to say with that terrifying context in mind. *A Highly Targetable Mental Illness: This game is engineered for a very specific type of person—the kind of absolute psycho who will willingly torture themselves for six hours just to build a "perfectly optimized" factory. *Actual Career Development: Ironically, it's making me better at my real job. It turns out that fixing upstream bottleneck shortages before they cascade downstream works the exact same way whether you're managing global logistics or screaming at a copper cable belt. *The Emotional Rollercoaster: This game is the fastest, most efficient vehicle for making me feel profoundly, frustratingly stupid, while simultaneously making me excited about it. It is a masterclass in humbling yourself. *Going Raw: I know there are a thousand wikis, guides, and pre-made blueprints out there. I refuse them all. I am determined to suffer through this completely alone. I adore the challenge, even when my own layout mocks me. *A Bittersweet Reality: Sadly, the developers recently announced that the major content updates are officially wrapped up as they shift to long-term support. It’s genuinely heartbreaking to know the boundaries of this universe are set, but honestly? It’s probably for the best. If they kept adding more, I would never see the sun again. *The Verdict: My only real complaint is that I’m already desperate for a sequel, despite the fact that I haven't even finished surviving the psychological warfare of the first one. Buy it. Join the cult. Embrace the spaghetti.

I don't recommend this game if you want a life. You will literally forget about the outside world, needing to eat, pee, anything. Worth it.