This is truest city-builder style game I have ever played, and it is now the benchmark against which I judge all other city-builder style games. In the relatively recent past, I played Banished for 16 hours and quit, and then played Cities:Skylines for 25 hours and quit. The reason I quit playing both games is because I had cracked the strategy to building a successful city and I felt like I was just going through the motions. Purusing online, I would see other people posting pictures of their respective cities with captions like "look how beautiful this is". I now fully realize what is missing from those games that Factorio has: increasing complexity. Banished and C:S have a baseline level of city-building, and when you reach that level, the game plateaus and it becomes about playing with window dressing. I don't care about window dressing, I want to build cities and face greater challenges as I go. Factorio does that. Factorio does not waste it's breath on superficial crap, the longer you play the game, the more complex it gets. The only other game I played that comes close to Factorio is Prison Architect (but that game has some limitations that become problematic once your prison reaches a certain size, and the devs have officially ceased development).

I have now played through one complete, non-story game. The goal is simple: build a rocket silo and launch a rocket. But getting to that point is far from simple. The game, more or less, has 4 phases - one for each type of research. In order to research technologies, you need a science pack. A given technology requires X number of science packs to be consumed by a laboratory, and crafting a science pack requires certain ingredients (which have to be crafted). There are 4 different science packs, and each one is exponentially more complicated to craft, which is where the 4 phases come from. By the time you build a base that crafts all 4 science packs, it will be a huge monstrosity of factories cramped together, convery belts running everywhere, and flying robots going all over the place. You will constantly be tracking down bottle-necks and tweaking everything. As you research new technologies and your needs change, you'll end up tearing down and rebuilding whole sections of your base.

This game is terribly addictive, increasingly complex, and doesn't waste time on aesthetics. I've put in 78 hours, and I still haven't learned everything. I'm both excited and daunted at the thought of starting a new game from scratch and doing it all over again. The game is early access, but in my opinion, it's ready to be officially released as-is (at least the single-player is, I haven't tried the multiplayer).


EDIT: this review is now outdated, but I don't feel like rewriting it.

This is truest city-builder style game I have ever played, and it is now the benchmark against which I judge all other city-builder style games. In the relatively recent past, I played Banished for 16 hours and quit, and then played Cities:Skylines for 25 hours and quit. The reason I quit playing both games is because I had cracked the strategy to building a successful city and I felt like I was just going through the motions. Purusing online, I would see other people posting pictures of their respective cities with captions like "look how beautiful this is". I now fully realize what is missing from those games that Factorio has: increasing complexity. Banished and C:S have a baseline level of city-building, and when you reach that level, the game plateaus and it becomes about playing with window dressing. I don't care about window dressing, I want to build cities and face greater challenges as I go. Factorio does that. Factorio does not waste it's breath on superficial crap, the longer you play the game, the more complex it gets. The only other game I played that comes close to Factorio is Prison Architect (but that game has some limitations that become problematic once your prison reaches a certain size, and the devs have officially ceased development). I have now played through one complete, non-story game. The goal is simple: build a rocket silo and launch a rocket. But getting to that point is far from simple. The game, more or less, has 4 phases - one for each type of research. In order to research technologies, you need a science pack. A given technology requires X number of science packs to be consumed by a laboratory, and crafting a science pack requires certain ingredients (which have to be crafted). There are 4 different science packs, and each one is exponentially more complicated to craft, which is where the 4 phases come from. By the time you build a base that crafts all 4 science packs, it will be a huge monstrosity of factories cramped together, convery belts running everywhere, and flying robots going all over the place. You will constantly be tracking down bottle-necks and tweaking everything. As you research new technologies and your needs change, you'll end up tearing down and rebuilding whole sections of your base. This game is terribly addictive, increasingly complex, and doesn't waste time on aesthetics. I've put in 78 hours, and I still haven't learned everything. I'm both excited and daunted at the thought of starting a new game from scratch and doing it all over again. The game is early access, but in my opinion, it's ready to be officially released as-is (at least the single-player is, I haven't tried the multiplayer). EDIT: this review is now outdated, but I don't feel like rewriting it.