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Factorio Review

Factorio is a base building game, with a strong focus on automation. In simple terms, the gameplay loop is just gathering resources, then using them to expand your factory. In practice, it becomes a complex game where you must strike a balance between expanding your factory and defending it from the native wildlife.

Your factory starts as just you, mining ore and stone in order to manually build things. By the end of the game, your goal is to launch a rocket into space. The journey to that goal is challenging, but satisfying. You go through many different advancements, unlocking more complex elements to add onto your factory. It is fantastically paced, preventing the gameplay from becoming stale. This level of depth can be overwhelming for a new player, but there are extensive customization options available, allowing the player to make their game easier, if need be.

Factorio is extremely polished, with a strong focus on performance. It is easily one of the most well optimized games I’ve ever played, something that is often an afterthought in modern game development. Gigantic factories, with thousands of moving parts run unbelievably smoothly, especially for a game that is partly an RTS, a genre often plagued by poor performance when there are too many entities.

When it comes to presentation, Factorio does a great job. The visuals are detailed enough to look good, but not too detailed that it impacts performance or gameplay. There is a consistent art style that allows factories to stand out from the natural environment, while still meshing together. It makes your factory look unnatural, which works well with the pollution mechanics in the game, as well as the overall goal. You spend all your time harvesting natural resources without worrying about the environment, and the game let’s you know. Factorio never gets into any moral discussions about climate change or pollution in general, but the visuals let you know that you are actually the villain of this world, rather than the hero.

The sound design is another of Factorio’s strong points. The ambient sounds, both from your machines and from nature, really sell the environment and atmosphere. When your factory is small and just getting started, the soundscape is quieter and more peaceful. This quickly changes as you expand, to the point of drowning out all other sounds in the game. It can be overbearing at times, but it fits the world of the game. The soundtrack wasn’t my favorite, and tended to feel more like background music. It was far from bad, but to me, it didn’t have much weight.

Factorio also features a talented modding community, with numerous overhaul mods that can make the already challenging base game even more complex. They range from more tame mods that simply try to expand on the default version of Factorio, to absurdly complex mods that require hundreds of hours just to create a large factory. There is something available for every taste, giving you the freedom to customize the game to be exactly how you like.

Factorio is a game made possible thanks to its dedicated development team. The defining feature of Factorio is how polished it is. This alone is enough to make it stand out. Factorio is truly a great game that fully deserves all of the praise it gets.

10/10

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