Recent reviews by LiteralAardvark

Factorio is an amazing game for so many reasons.

But I want to focus on two that mean a lot to me: endless expandability, and mod support.

The way you "win" the game is by automating and growing your factory until it's big and complex enough to launch a rocket into space. But even though it takes many hours to get to that point, that is nowhere near the true end of the game.

Once your factory is that big, your next challenge is: can I automate launching a rocket? And then: can I do it again? Can I fully automate the process? Can I make a base that launches one rocket per minute? Each time your factory grows bigger, you find a new bottleneck to troubleshoot, or a new, more efficient production method to try. Some players make their factory so huge, the bottleneck becomes the speed of the computer they're playing on!

But even when that runs out, which eventually it will after many hours, this game has MODS.

The game designers worked hard to make this game both easily moddable, and easy to play and install mods for. Mod support is built right into the game, and the Factorio community has responded with a deluge of well-crafted mods that function as entire overhauls of the game experience.

Many mods are complete overhauls, which create entirely new, longer, and more complex games on top of the Factorio framework. A few examples:
Krastorio is roughly double the complexity of the base game and adds another 40 hours of play, minimum. It's the first and easiest mod the community recommends.
Space Exploration adds, as you might imagine, SPACE. Mine other planets, build an orbital space platform, coordinate multiple bases across multiple planets. This mod takes 150 to 300 hours (!!!!!) to beat.
And the most notoriously complex overhaul mod, Pyanodons, typically takes over 700 (700!) hours to beat.

I'm almost 300 hours in and I'm finishing the base game, but thanks to the excellent game created by Wube and the fantastic volunteer modding community, I have many more hours of Factorio ahead of me.

Give Factorio a shot. It's not for everyone, but the people who like Factorio *REALLY* like it.

There just isn't a game out there quite like Subnautica. Exploration at its finest.