Abiotic Factor Review (DregSmoker Dixie)
Abiotic Factor is Half-Life if, instead of Gordon Freeman, you played as a Scientist instead.
That obvious inspiration aside, it is a mechanically deep entertaining experience. Abiotic Factor is a Survival game. You have to scavenge for resources, and food and water as you make your way through the facility. Along the way, you can bring furniture and other items with you to fortify "safe" locations to make bases. You also have Skills, that are leveled up as you use them, like in the early Elder Scrolls games. For example, crouching near enemies without being noticed will increase your sneak skill, and successfully cooking raw meat will increase your cooking skill.
Progress is slow at the start, as you really rely on breaking down basically everything around you to craft basic things, but as you make more and more progress, this grind becomes shorter and shorter. The early game, which includes the Cafeteria and The Office Sector, doesn't really have much of a variety of resources, so you will be relying on the Makeshift Spear, and whatever armor you can find or craft, and when you can finally make a keypad hacker, the standard handgun, but once you reach Manufacturing West, the game really opens up, throwing new materials and items at you in droves.
Along with the GATE Facility, there are also "portal worlds". Much like XEN in Half-Life, Abiotic Factor has numerous alien worlds you can explore by finding and fixing portal equipment. These range from bizarre dream like alien worlds, to a world that is literally just Silent Hill, with infinite Fog. You can build bases in these worlds, and leave them at any time to go back to the facility, adding even more depth to the Open World.
This game is good fun, and the challenge of the enemies makes stealth actually viable. One of the more interesting things the game does is, any resource can basically be part of a crafting recipe, and the first time you pick up a new resource, your character will think of a unique way of using that resource. This will show new crafting recipe ideas in your recipe tree, which, to actually be able to use them, you need to solve a recipe puzzle, i.e., dragging and dropping the correct resource to creating the crafting recipe.
You cannot "lose" these puzzles, and they just exist to show you what you will eventually use for said recipe, but it's fun, and makes learning recipes more engaging than just leveling up and suddenly being able to know how to create something.
Abiotic Factor is overall, one of the more interesting survival open world games out there. It also supports coop, as is a genre staple, so really, this game is well worth it's price. Highly Recommended.
July 22ND, 2025 - 1.0 Full Release Update
I have had nothing but enjoyment from my time with Abiotic Factor, and 1.0 has added even more amounts of content.
At the time of my review, I had just gotten to Reactors, which was the full amount of content up until 1.0. As of this update, I'm still in Reactors, however, there is a huge amount of new content that has been added. All of the Skills have been raised to Level 20, adding more depth to the skill system, and adding more tiers of bonus upgrades you can get as you increase them.
One of the new things I have seen, is an entity called "The Moving Box". I am assuming this creature spawns randomly in a radius around you while you're moving about the facility, and anything you put inside of it, you can take out later when he spawns again. That is just a guess at this point however.
Biggest inclusion is another crafting bench, the "Enhancement Bench". Before 1.0, weapons were mostly static, with melee, projectile, and firearm options. However, the only real upgrade you could give the firearms was a flashlight attached to the Security Pistol. Now, this Enhancement Bench allows you to upgrade vast amounts of all types of things. Deployables, Weapons, Tools, etc. I am very happy with this inclusion, so much to the point that I enjoyed going all the way back to one of my starting bases to get the required materials to make it! There are LOADS of recipes for this thing, and the amount of different useable weapons it as added is awesome!
I am not at the newly added story content as of writing, but, the review remains the same. This is one of the most enjoyable and deeply rich Survival Crafting games I've played, and it def belongs in your library.