From Coffee Stain studios — the makers of titles such as Goat Simulator and Sanctum comes a new futuristic factory building game named Satisfactory.
Combining FPS and strategy elements in one, the game works best on a PC having Windows 7 or later. What’s more, if you love the look of massive automated factories, this game gives you a chance to build your own. Running the show is a fictitious corporation called FicSit that has the sole intent of wanting to industrialise every accessible alien planet.
At the start of the game, you get to choose from an array of locations such as grass fields, Northern forests or a rocky desert. Choose grass fields, for instance and your character is dropped down onto an alien planet with very basic tools, with the main premise being to construct, explore, exploit and of course, automate. The controls take a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes second nature. One must first build a hub using the construction tool. The hub is like the heart, providing upgrades and means of crafting raw materials into usable resources. Once that is done, you can use the same construction tool to scan for resources. This is where exploration comes into play, as the vast lands have resources spread over an area that are waiting to be tapped into.
This is a major difference between standard strategy games and Satisfactory — while one generally just scrolls around in strategy games, you need to (virtually) walk here to scout the area.
The world is massive, with varied flora and fauna, and each area has its own eco-system. More importantly, this world is not devoid of danger — alien residents don’t like visitors and actively attack when in range.
While smaller alien creatures go down with a couple of blows, you are better off avoiding the big ones until you have bigger and better weapons. Once you get hold of some basic resources, you can start to build your factory, the priority being to amass resources. There are several types of ores, the common ones being iron, copper and limestone. Powering the factory initially is biomass, which is produced from the leaves and wood found all around the map.
As you keep building and upgrading your tech, you get access to coal and crude oil, which burn slower and provide more power using their respective generators. The world is not randomly generated, but meticulously designed by the developers, sprinkling the right resources with the right amount of resistance by the alien creatures.
Given that this is only an early access version of the game, many more tiers are likely to open up. Also, the developers probably have many more surprises up their sleeve. Though it doesn’t seem likely that you would get addicted to the game, the different environments, the game play and the satisfaction of automating your factory will definitely keep you coming back for more.
