Recent reviews by 『 』

At first, there's no appeal or that sense of refinement you'd see in larger games: No fancy UI, no high resolution sprites and icons, and relatively simple textures. Instead, you have grey translucent menus, pixelated graphics (most notibly with the player sprite), and just enough detail to make each object look rugged.

But the first step is all you need to take to realize that it doesn't matter. None of what was previously mentioned mattered. This game starts off slow and takes you through the basics, and shoves you into the world. Next, you're experiementing with basic automation, trying to complete basic research. Then you try to automate more and more of it, seeing how making things manually is tedious, and most importantly, not worth your time.

Then you realize it's been 8 hours, and you've only scratched the surface of the game. Your factory has become a mess, trying to add more forces you to go through maybe over an hour of planning to make sure you don't screw your factory up, while you're experimenting with ways to get your everlacking amounts of resources to your factory. Factorio has become a puzzle game.

And maybe once you're all done with that, you'll add in mods for another 200 hours worth of gameplay time.

What Factorio lacks in it's relatively simple graphics is made up in the solid gameplay and aesthetic. Every time you play through a game, the random generation of the map forces you to think of new strategies to support your factory. Mid-game you're either rushing to defend your base or confused and conflicted as to where to expand next. Everything you do makes it so it seems like two more possibilities were created. And while the art is simple, it's streamlined. There's no need for any of that fancy graphics one might see in Hearthstone or Limbo, and works with what it has to create something simple yet addicting. Of course, it's always a nice addition, but it's a mere nitpick.

Gameplay seems endless. The more you progress and settle, the more problems and challenges you face, whether it be logisitical or physical. Mid-game becomes a challenge of "How do I properly prepare for the future?", and End-game becomes a question of "How can I make my factory even better." There's always a way to improve your factory, whether making it more compact, reducing energy usage, or increasing efficiency. There's always something to do, and it keeps you moving, enticed, engaged.

The audio is all ambience. While there is a sense of background music, it's not prominent enough to have you remember a melody, but enough to add to the atmosphere. It's what you want when you're in-game playing for over 10 hours in a single session. Otherwise, you'll hear the gurgling of your pipes, the sound of steam releasing, or if you're far away exploring, nothing.

There is mod support right out of the box, which allows the community to create and modify the game to make it personal, whether adding a large modset that completely forces you to start anew to small quality of life mods that make it easier to understand your factory. It's amazing what some mods do given the simplicity of the game.

I can only describe this game with two words: "Streamlined" and "Addicting".

Play the demo, try it out yourself. It's worth your time... Just stay alert of how much time you use.