izigame.me

Honestly, it would be better off as a Minecraft mod.
Despite providing the player with a full-on third dimension of factory building, Foundry does little to back it up. Building in this game feels very awkward and uncomfortable. There are many cases, small and big, that contribute to me saying that it is by far one of the worst implementations I've experienced. Even on PC, with a keyboard and a mouse I get frustrated whenever I need to set up a new production line. And on Steam Deck building takes on average three times longer. This is how I progressed to a point when I realised the game is not fun so slowly I've lost my refund privilege.
Compared to the other factory builders, I just don't feel any flow in Foundry. For example, in the 2D representatives of the genre the conveyor handling feels like a fun minigame, since the layout is right before the player's eyes, easy to modify and traverse. In Foundry, however, it feels like I'm battling not my conveyor spaghetti, but rather the voxel grid itself.
Immersiveness of Satisfactory, coming at a cost of time-consuming building, has the potential to reward the player with beautiful results, if enough effort is put. Not everyone can immediately merge large factories into the game's beautiful scenery, but everyone is given the opportunity. Foundry is obviously lacking in terms of immersion and realism, trading it for a voxel world that it doesn't properly utilize.
Speaking of voxel worlds, Minecraft industrial mods provide a much more fun experience. Whether it's progressive IC2, pushing you towards new milestones without forcing you to set up another production line, which all look the same in the end, as in, frankly, many factory builders. Whether it's sophisticated Create, where every production line feels natural and unique due to a variety of crafting recipes, utilizing fans, presses, drills, combined into proper sequences and not just “input conveyor-input device-building-output device-output conveyor” for every item.
Utilizing the third dimension in Foundry feels like quite a challenge as well. Not only the size of conveyor slopes makes changing depth annoying, but also the added difficulty of traversing the factory with multiple layers, including the loss of transparency for lower levels.
But you can just rebuild anything you are not comfortable with in your factory? I'm not comfortable with building itself there. I'm not even talking about how cheap forcing the player to build foundations everywhere is. You are put into a vast living world and your objective is to properly cover it all in foundations so you can build somewhere. I'd rather play the electric poles minigame, even early on.
In terms of other content, the player is greeted with a large research tree, feeling more like a burden to unlock rather than a mountain to climb, considering the weird first building experience. The station management mechanics and commerce not only feel unfitting so early into the game, but also look detached from what the player does most of their time – it's like if you put stock trading into Terraria, just so it exists for some reason. I'm not forcing myself to progress further, where supposed fun stuff might be, if I can't have fun in the first two hours.
After a year in development the robotic companion of questionable usefulness still only has one voiceline, while the talking AI still feels annoying, as if I'm watching a kids cartoon. Factory builders are not supposed to be friendly and soothing, it’s about players making work fun. ADA in Satisfactory handles it well, while the narrator in Dyson Sphere Program at least keeps the explanations strict. When interacting with creatures, your only feedback for the “Pet” action is… I don't know, a sound? The world doesn’t seem lively despite the wrapping.
To summarize, I've purchased Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program for prices twice as low as Foundry and had much more fun there. If you are into putting blocks onto a voxel grid, try Minecraft mods, such as Create, IndustrialCraft 2, Modern Industrialization etc. If you want to express your 3D-building skills in a more live world, try Satisfactory. If you are into mechs, planets and long-range logistics, try Dyson Sphere Program. And if you just want to have a guaranteed good experience with factory builders, try Factorio.
There are just so many games that do almost anything Foundry does better, and whatever content the competitors don't cover (like commerce) doesn't seem to be worth it at the moment.