izigame.me

EDIT: I've put another 25 or so hours into Satisfactory 1.1 to see if it addressed my concerns at all. My notes on that are at the end.
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tl;dr: This is an incredibly good, fun game with an incredibly awful end game problem. Definitely buy it, definitely play it, definitely do not plan on finishing it.
Factorio is a classic in the genre of this type of game but it can be quite obtuse. And then once you're out of the obtuse stage, every moment of your Factorio life is trying to figure out what thing you're going to run out of next or not make enough of next. Things start out simply enough with a few short assembly lines making "iron line" components and "copper line" components that eventually merge into combined components. It's also a game where you're endlessly rebuilding and expanding, rebuilding and expanding your factory until it eventually it becomes a behemoth and you win the game. But before that happens, you are in endless calculation mode trying to balance out how much of this is needed to build that. And most people just eyeball it and are in an endless repetition of finding the bottlenecks in your production chains or finding more resources to pump into your production chains and fixing them over and over again.
At the end of the day, it couldn't be clearer that Satisfactory just started as 3D environment Factorio. And it opens quite a bit less obtuse than Factorio with the most solid tutorial I've seen in a game in a very long time. But soon enough, you're lowered gently to the dirt and are playing 3D Factorio. And the complications from that start instantly because there are endless variations to the (fixed map) terrain to challenge you, places to explore, places that are off-limits to you because of poison gas, too tough critters, or both. But quite soon, you have some constructors and assemblers going and the best robot assistant voice since GlaDOS is nudging you up the technology chain.
Two things spoil the fun, and they're related.
Because Satisfactory is both a 3D game where you have to look at things in front of you instead of from overhead, and because it's a 3D game that you have to move around in, constructing all those assemblers and conveyor belts is *much* more complicated and time-consuming than it appears at first glance. You have only limited opportunities to drag a conveyor belt from there to there and have it line up perfectly. Instead, you will be constantly, constantly trying to judge alignment and height and very often getting them wrong. The game gives you a few tools to help you (many have to be bought in a hysterical little "bonus store" that you unlock early in the proceedings) but mostly you start to build up experience at how to move things around. And finally, just before the late game, you get a hoverpack which is a freakin' godsend. Because until you get it, you are constantly running this way and that, jumping up on machines to get an overhead view, trying to judge angles and heights and it's just a nightmare, a nightmare.
But the whole time, your brain is going 4500 RPM and you're having an absolute blast.
The fun is greatly enhanced by the best map in a game of this type since Subnautica... and honestly, this map might be *better* than Subnautica. The feel of distinct biomes is intense, the difficulty ramps up believably and linearly, and each biome gives unique resources, rewards, and challenges. Great stuff!
...until you reach Phase 4.
Up until this point, every mechanic in the game has been advancing in a linear fashion from one challenge to the next. And yes, like Factorio, you'll find yourself rebuilding a large part of your factory to take advantage of expanding resources and capabilities. But suddenly in Phase 4, the game demands that you trash a very large percentage of your factory and your expectations as the resource requirements suddenly explode exponentially... and I don't use the word "exponentially" lightly. To use one example, up until Phase 4, you can do quite well exploiting only two "normal" class copper nodes and two or three normal oil nodes for your entire factory. But to build a single Phase 4 component (supercomputers), you have to find and exploit five normal copper and eight normal oil nodes... just to build this single component with no copper or oil available for anything else.
And this is why 94% of Satisfactory players don't get past Phase 3. Hell, fewer than half the players that reach Phase 3 finish Phase 4, and these are players who have made a major commitment of time to this game to master Phase 3. I suspect even most serious Satisfactory players don't try to push for Phase 4 and just redo Phase 3 factories again and again, particularly since the late Phase 4 technologies aren't fun or engaging the way they are for previous phases.
So, all in all, Satisfactory is a marvelous game and I strongly recommend it as something to try if the concept appeals to you. But don't plan on finishing it, because you almost certainly won't.
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EDIT for Satisfactory 1.1: First thing, a side note. The northern edge of the Satisfactory map (called the Spire Coast in the wiki) is the single most beautiful location I've seen in any video game ever. Bravo! Just lovely, incredibly lovely. I hope the Subnautica 2 devs have seen it. Moving on.
I put a couple dozen more hours into Satisfactory once 1.1 was released. Does it address my concerns? In many small ways, yes! There's much more control in terms of belt spacing, angles, heights, et cetera. The fact that you can now just build a conveyor lift where you want one and then route belts to it is terrific. But in the big ways? No, Satisfactory hasn't changed at all and still has the same horrid end game problem.
As an experiment, I decided to build a satellite factory just to produce 3.75 supercomputers per minute (two Manufacturers worth). I found the right amount of oil and copper and started building the factory... only to in the end need nearly **40** Refineries between those needed to produce the plastic (most of them) and the rest devoted to converting residual waste into fuel. The fuel waste alone was able to drive 10 Fuel Generators. In addition, this build required 20 smelters, 30 or so constructors, 15 or so assemblers... it was endless. It was a huge unwieldy nightmare, about half the size of the entire main factory.
...and it looked freakin' hideous. Refineries are huge, blocky, and ugly, as are Fuel Generators, as are 70-odd assemblers and constructors crammed into a single factory. There's a reason all these cool "factory build" videos you see on Youtube with gorgeous-looking factory buildings center on small numbers of the small, good-looking machines and the ugly stuff is never shown, sent far away from prying eyes. But that's not what Satisfactory is. Most of the time, you're going to have endless forests of ugly buildings reaching high into the sky with no walls or roofs or lovely glass windows or nice colors in sight.
And finally, the icing on the cake is that this enormous satellite factory was in the end producing 3.75 supercomputers per minute... how do I get those back to my main factory to use them? It takes two hours to produce 10 stacks of supercomputers, so a train would be wildly, ludicrously unnecessary and wasteful. I decided that if I were to continue that save, the most efficient way of transporting the supercomputers would be to dump them into a dimensional depot and then magically teleport them into my inventory by dragging them out of the depot when I need them to manually place them into other machines since the numbers are so small. It just didn't make sense to me to build a whole train network across half the map to move 30-odd supercomputers every ten minutes. That was just such an absurdity that it kind of made me laugh.
So... yeah. Satisfactory is fantastic, an excellent game that you should buy and play. But still, worst end-game problem of any game that I can remember.