Foundry Review (Matchstick)
FOUNDRY feels very weird after 300 hours of Satisfactory. After an hour and a half of FOUNDRY, here are my initial thoughts.
BAD STUFF:
All the icons are very tiny. Maybe that's because there will be a lot of them, I don't know. I also wish they were sub-categorized a little more extensively (platforms should be separate from belts, belts should be separate from smelters, etc). It's currently difficult to find specific things. The symbology is distinct enough that it's only a minor inconvenience.
The game (currently) doesn't account for a 5-button mouse. I ALWAYS bind things like Map and Inventory to my extra mouse buttons, and not having that option (yet) is irritating.
The art style is a bit cartoon-y for my rugged, stainless-steel, super-industrial-grade Satisfactory brain. Not the game's fault, of course, just something I'll have to adjust to.
The AI assistant in Foundry is masculine and is equally as uninteresting as the one in Satisfactory, though it feels like it's trying a little too hard to be quirky every so often.
GOOD STUFF:
The game does not require you to convert leaves, logs, and petals into biomass before putting it in a biomass burner. You whack your drill against a tree and it turns into universal biomass that you can immediately throw into a bio burner, and WOW is that an improvement over using Constructors to turn piles of leaves and stacks of logs into biomass separately. No chainsaw needed either, you can just defoliate things from the start. No one likes dealing with biomass burners, and Foundry already knows that, so it streamlines it as much as possible.
Early-game machinery in Foundry also uses metal floor plates to connect things to generators, so there are no power poles as well. So no "you only get four slots on this pole, make another one, then make another one" stuff; just slap it all down on the same section of platforms and it runs.
Most critically, the introductory miners/smelters/bio burners/etc are all like 2x2x2 blocks at the most (the bio burner is only 1x1x2). You can put a miner and two smelters into the same space as a Satisfactory Mk 1 Miner, except they're also 1/3 as tall. On top of that, you don't have to open a menu on every individual machine to view the conversion rates. They're openly visible on screens that you can check at a glance. So now the machines take up less space AND there's less menuing. And on top of THAT, they all have multiple input/output slots, and you can CHOOSE WHICH ONE IS WHICH??? And they're SIDE BY SIDE???
...why ARE all the machines in Satisfactory so big? Why did I have to open the menu for every single one? Why did power poles only run four connectors? Why did they have dedicated input/output ports, when they could have been modular? I mean...it looked so nice and professional, and it made the player character feel small in comparison to the factory, but looking back it was so inefficient and frustrating and needless, and the slowness of the early game just feels artificial now.
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Factory games, for me, are about production and efficiency. Less space, more output, increase complexity, decrease downtime. This game is all about that. No wasted space, significantly fewer limitations, simple conversion rates. You want the realism, get Satisfactory. You want the factory, get Foundry.