I played Satisfactory and lemme tell ya: I would rather play Factorio by far.
I like the idea of Factorio, but 3D. I really do. But in practice it’s way more navigation than I care to do. Just a lot of walking around, jumping, holding shift to run, trying to remember where the hell my copper mine is, etc. It feels like this extra layer on top of the Factory part distracts me from the goals of automation.
Even with that I think I’d be into it except the menus in this game are godawful. There should be a hotkey for attaching a power line to stuff rather than having to go
Q → Click Power Tab → Click Power Line
There should be a quick bar that lets you switch what’s in your hand instead of
Tab → Find item you want to use → Drag it over to your hand → Tab to close
Like, if I’m in the middle of trying to kill an innocent animal (that just happens to be a mastiff-sized armadillo that’s running straight for me) I don’t really want to do that to switch over to my stun gun, y’know?
Everything is a specific hotkey to open a menu then multiple clicks to make that thing happen. I hate it.
Even beyond that, the progression is so fucking slow. Like, the early stages of Factorio take a while but you at least start with, uh, conveyor belts?? I had to go through 5 main base upgrades before getting conveyor belts. And yes, that’s the tutorial but it doesn’t really teach you how to use the conveyor belts or really automate anything anyway? It’s mostly just a tutorial on how to manually craft materials and use them to progress though the game. It’s building really bad habits!! You should be automating everything all the time!!!
It’s pretty, and the music is really nice. I suspect that it’s a perfectly fine game if you want to have a fairly chill time. But it turns out that if I’m playing a game about strip-mining a planet and murdering all its wildlife, I want it to be ugly, mean, and efficient.