Factorio Review

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Developers have an accord with the community that game will never go on sale. Having a small discount when buying in bundle with an expansions is fine, but if game ever goes on sale, this review will become negative.

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Factorio is one of those games which will remain classic to most people. It is a game which filled a niche and created a genre upon itself. It is a standard to which other factory style games can be compared to.

Game is like Minecraft. It is devoid of purpose. You must set them yourself if you want to enjoy playing it and it would be better be along the lines: “factory must grow” or else you might end up disappointed. You can sure try to launch the rocket and be satisfied by it. However, if you will not have goals or desire to try something new, game will eventually feel empty. It does not have enough polish or dynamic content to make you engaged any more than a playthrough and it relies heavily on modders keeping you entertained.

Game is designed around producing as much stuff as possible. Producing stuff for the sake of producing more stuff.

 

        Power Generation

• One of the areas where this is apparent is power generation. In this game, it is simplified to the point of absurdity. Only coal power is somewhat balanced method. Solar panels are pollution free and even generate electricity at night. However, for mega factories you need nuclear power. Nuclear power at first seems to require a lot of uranium ore, however there is Kovarex enrichment process which converts all of your excessive U-238 to useful U-235. However, that is not how enrichment process works at all. This process defies laws of thermodynamics and produces more energy from a closed system than you inputted. This results in you producing an infinite amount of electricity without needed to worry about running out of fuel. Since nuclear power produces a ton of electricity and fuel for it is practically infinite, a player does not need to consider electrical management in its Factory design. Factories as a result tend to be grossly inefficient and it is designed that way to crank as big of the numbers as possible.
  
  Modules & Beacons
• I never liked modules, because they demand you to rethink how you design your base from what game just taught you. Then they introduce arcade-like stackable bonuses like -50% electricity consumption which somehow directly relates to pollution. Then you get speed modules which can add up to 150% speed and combine that with 50% extra speed. You do get ridiculous performance gains. This can be used as a lazy excuse not to design a better factory, because you can just make it magically far better or it can be used to inflate production at a whim instead of building more lines or just using lower end assemblers. They also trivialise things like pollution management in this game. This mechanic breaks a lot of systems in this game and it is done to inflate players production quotas and to allow them to control production/pollution speed with a switch of a button. This raises a question for me. Why you can’t just design a factory to do such a thing? Isn’t designing a factory the whole point in Factorio? As it happens, no it is not. Factory must grow, as they say. The whole point of this game are big numbers as you produce stuff for stuff’s sake.
  
  Conveyor Belts
• Conveyor belts are another affront to God. It defies natural order of things and is an infinite energy generator. You do not need to fuel it or to maintain it. It is a perfect solution to solve all your logistics needs for free. This had stuck with me, because I remember playing Settlers 2 and how much fun I had in that game managing roads and logistics of my workers going to the various production buildings and bringing back goods. Logistics of an economy game was always the part which I enjoyed the most. This part is greatly simplified in Factorio. Instead you have a perfect line which delivers goods anywhere you want to quite extreme speeds. Massive speed of Express Belts allows players to fully saturate a single belt without having to think amount multi-belt approach due to bandwidth limitations.
  
  Drones
• These little fellows actually surprised me, because they are fun to use and ability to construct factories from blueprints on global map is actually a very useful feature as it is an auto repair. However, that is just another example how logistics is overly simplified in this game. Drones allow you to transport anything anywhere without a need to worry about physical connections. They essentially nullify need for logistics for anything, but most volume intensive tasks. Since electricity is essentially free in this game, drones also become a free tool to use.

Games like this often attract people with deep personal issues who use games as an escape mechanism. Such people often make everyone else as miserable as they are. I tried to share my experience in Steam forum, but it is an open battleground. People can’t accept that a person might have something negative to say. They do not understand what an opinion is. They try to argue against an opinion and to prove that your opinion is wrong and their opinion is right. They pretend to talk in place of developers and create toxic, unwelcoming place where you must either fall into the party lines of “FACTORY MUST GROW AT ALL COSTS” or get ready for constant harassment and questioning. These people will contest literally everything you say. Will scream how wrong you are at everything and then immediately drop the conversation in the middle of discussion and never talk about it again.

However, I kept pushing through not for them, but for my right to use public places to express my own experiences. I’m sharing more detailed version of them here:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Calicifer/discussions/0/3824158244554053005/

If you want to see what a mess this community is, you can go to watch circus here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/427520/discussions/0/3826410044369061413/?tscn=1689276285


Factorio is a long game. It is a giant time commitment. It was fun at times, bothersome at other moments and plain boring in the end. It front loads its difficulty at player at the start and then proceeds to simplify all the processes after mid game. However, mid game was where I had most fun in trying to figure out and do something unique. After that, it was about redesigning my base over and over again to meet ever increasing production demands. Then it was about constantly doing mundane stuff and connecting more base materials supply. In the end, I achieved sustainable production which allowed me to fully complete the game. It felt empty and hollow as it overstayed its welcome. It drags everything mercilessly. You get unreasonably high requirements of everything and thus you have to spend a lot of time growing your factory. It constantly shifts what you need, from where you need it and how much you need it. This drags out gameplay and complicates it to players which causes high drop out rates even among veterans who tried main campaign many times, but dropped it. Fully completing vanilla experience is a chore. Then you do it, it just feels empty as game has nothing else to offer.

Calicifer’s Reviews

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