izigame.me

Comparisons to Factorio are unavoidable... but unwarranted. Satisfactory and Factorio have almost nothing in common. This game has a prebuilt map; the resource nodes have infinite ore; the combat is janky and entirely optional; there is no programmable automation whatsoever; and you are accompanied by a narrator. I have a better comparison. Satisfactory is Subnautica with conveyor belts.
Subnautica was an exploration game with base-building tacked on. It was dominated by exploration.
Satisfactory seems like an exploration game with base-building tacked on. It is dominated by base-building.
Both games require you to mine ore patches to progress through a mandatory tech tree, tied to the main story line.
Both games also have an optional tech tree, which you progress through via exploration (searching ruins for new blueprints).
Both games also have a predetermined map; fixed locations with infinite ore; and janky combat that is entirely optional.
Satisfactory, however, has no story. You explore only to see the pretty landscapes, and maybe to search for entirely optional technologies in ruins. There is a narrator who alternates between humorous, Dilbert-style corporate satire; and - frankly - a boring, repetitive and incoherent code-speak that never gets to the point. It seems that they never finished the story and just released the game.
On the main menu, the game asks you what world you want: grasslands, rocky desert, mountains or sandy desert. It doesn't make it clear that these are not different planets - they are merely different spawn points on the same gigantic map.
Ore patches are infinite. You are only limited by the mining rate of the single extractor you may place on them. As mentioned before - the map is gigantic. Ore patches can be literally miles apart. Unfortunately, long-range transport is unlocked surprisingly late in the game -- most players are likely to build multiple-kilometre conveyor belts that clip through terrain.
Regarding conveyor belts, another problem is that "smart" splitters are unlocked shockingly late into the game. Effectively, for the entire game it will be impossible to put more than one resource type on one belt! The only way to manage it would be to maintain a perfect ratio at 100% uptime (else you will clog your machines and have to manually deconstruct).
It will also be impossible to load more than one type of resource onto a vehicle (let alone to unload and sort). Want to bring extra fuel in the cargo? Tough luck.
And by the way, these "smart" splitters are just filters. They can't count, they can't send or receive signals. This is a factory-building game with zero programmable automation. None of the machines can be controlled except by hand. The only concern are ratios. All of your machines will be turned on all of the time. All of your machines have a separate conveyor entrance for each crafting ingredient. All of your conveyor belts will only contain one item type.
Speaking of ratios, though: the ingame encylopedia is excellent. There's an intuitive search function, and one of my favourite QoL aspects is that you can type math equations into the search function! You can just type 310/17 into the search function and then copy/paste 18.235 widgets per minute into all of your machines - and the machine will automatically convert 18.235 widgets per minute to 91.175% operating speed. Satisfactory absolutely gets the ratio part of the game right.
Perhaps where the game shines the most is scale. A basic crafting machine in Satisfactory is roughly the size of... 2x2x4 metres? This is one of the smallest machines in the game - and you will need hundreds of them! The impossible to avoid conveyor spaghetti and staggering scale of even a noob factory is a sight to behold. I love seeing screenshots of random people's endgame factories. They are all different, have some of their creator's personality, and are too big to fit on multiple screenshots.
The problem with scale, though, is that Satisfactory can't handle large-scale building. You must build these gigantic factories one small piece at a time. The (small) blueprint tool has to be unlocked. The big blueprint is unlocked around the same time that the game ends. But the worst part by far is building train tracks. You can only build them in what feels like 50 metres at a time - yet the map is almost 10 kilometres across.
I hate to say this about a game that entered early access 6 years ago (as of 2025), but I think it still has potential to grow. No idea whether the devs are planning to expand on the QoL... or on the equally tedious faux-story narrator bollocks that doesn't go anywhere. Seriously guys, put a story in it. Or at least make the narrator's speaking in tongues actually go anywhere. Even if you 100% the game with all exploration and all the hard drives - there is no payoff. The cryptic dialogue just runs out without going anywhere.
That said... Satisfactory has a lot of charm. It has humour, it has personality. It's janky and tedious, yet I liked it. Enough, even, to want to play through it a second time. Maybe one day I'll have an extra 80 hours lying around.