Picture: Wube Software
Crashed on an alien planet. Alone. Alone?
Factorio starts with you nothing more than feeling puzzled as what the hell to do now and one goal: build a rocket and get off that alien planet!
GETTING STARTED / GAMEMODES
Either self-taught through free play or with the guidance of the new campaign (0.17) you will learn how to make a factory outpost that gets you all the things you need to survive!
Campaign helps new players understand the basic concepts of running a factory through giving you meaningful tasks to fulfill, with each of them showing you how things work in general and how they can work together.
Unlike other games tutorials, you will keep your progress as you go through the story as your surrounding map gives you more and more features / challenges to experiment with.
You will solve basic bottleneck problems and you will learn one thing:
THE FACTORY MUST GROW! As your needs of resources are ever increasing.
The real fun starts in Free play:
You start with a map generator, where you can pick and choose between any settings you want:
richness and size of resources
number of trees
landmass to water ratio
enemy frequency and size
ENEMIES
Wait: Enemies? That’s right! You thought you are all alone, but in fact your neighbors have been watching you closely.
As you build more and more machines you will pollute the air generating a cloud of pollutants several times larger than your factory. As soon as the cloud reaches nearby hives of the indigenous aliens, also known as Biters, they sense that there is something wrong and will start to seek you out, in the quest of destroying whatever the source of the pollution is.
And they are smart about it! You can wall yourself in and put up gun turrets, the Biters may fail, but they will learn, and they will find that ONE spot where you DONT have a gun turret placed.
Time is of the essence. If you don't turn down pollution or research better ammo you will be overrun sooner or later.
The pollution will cause the Biters to evolve growing ever larger in size, gaining mutations that allow them to spit acid or flammable substances and many more. Also, there is worms which will hurl acidic slime at you that will slow you down, so be careful!
GAMEPLAY
Progression through the game is divided into lines of research which are divided by science packs. Each and every one of these research projects will benefit you in one way or another and in the end, you finally get access to rocketry!
It always feels so rewarding getting a new research project done and immediately see how it benefits you.
In the end there is nothing more enjoyable than to zoom out and see your writhing almost living base bring in raw resources, turning them into intermediate products and eventually into a rocket. As soon as you launched your first rocket you will see the "Victory" Screen, but Factorio is never over. You can choose to stay on your planet and move on with ever better researches making your machines even faster, hunting for that most effective setup for a product. Or maybe you will master the art of blueprinting?
MULTIPLAYER
Another real big bonus is that you can reload any single player save game and play it via multiplayer.
There is an in-game lobby which you can use to play with your steam friends. You can also make your own save game of any multiplayer map you’ve been on and play it in single player, if that isn’t a cool functionality, I don’t know what is.
GRAPHICS / INTERFACE
The graphics of Factorio are artistically crafted and with the recent (0.17) polish they got upgraded even more. Every detail of any aspect of the game is depicted in an absolutely good-looking manner. Enemies have animations for walking and attacking and they do make sounds, which are adding up to the already tense feeling when they are around.
The interface is well made and sits neatly in the center of the screen where you can assign quick bar slots to items in your inventory, complete with shiftable rows via hotkey.
Researches add more functionality to your interface like a copy and paste function or the ability to turn your exoskeleton and personal roboports on and off. There is a hot key available for almost everything you can think of, but the intuitive interface allows the game practically to be played just with WASD and a mouse.
Map markers can be placed on the world map and assigned icons and text.
The train interface allows for easy rerouting and switching of conditions for train stations. You can even send your trains to a spot somewhere on the rail network!
tool tips are very generous with information and tell you everything you need to know.
MODDING
Every single aspect of the game is modable, if you are not afraid of scripting LUA you can change Factorio in whatever you want. The game is so open to the community you can find a mod for almost everything. After you are finished with the base game (or just whenever) mods will add another lay of complexity on top of whatever you already learned. Big Ones like Bob's or Angel's add a ton of new buildings and functionality to the game others just make your trains "HONK" or your bots "BUZZ" or make your weapons fire tracer bullets.
If it exists there is a mod for it. If there is no mod for it, you can make one!
A very nice and wise decision from WUBE, because modding communities give live to games on a whole new level.
CONCLUSION
The game is already well polished and yet the devs still work on it with determination and love; sometimes, if there is a mod that they like they even integrate it into the game! Progress can be followed through their own devblog (every Friday!).
For a small price you will get a game that hones your thinking and problem-solving skills in a very well-made automation environment. With hundreds of items to automate, design and build production chains for, finding ever new ways to tweak your production, you will never run out of things to do.
If you love to look for ways how to get your factory even more efficient and love that rewarding feeling when something that you just built, works perfectly get this game at once!
I have had many hours of fun with Factorio and will have many more.
A truly great game, worthy of being a Gold Standard title in the Simulation Genre!
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