Factorio
Wube Software LTD.
Factorio, developed by Wube Software LTD., is a factory building game, with an emphasis on automation. In a reductive sense, the gameplay revolves around gathering resources and utilizing them to expand your factory base.
You’ve just crash-landed on an alien planet and your goal is to ultimately build a rocket to launch off into space and get back home. However, you don’t start with anything, just the knowledge of how to mine and smelt ore and build all sorts of highly inventive machines.
Things begin at a slower pace as you learn the basics. The more you build out your burgeoning factory base, the more complex things will become and the more pollution you’ll generate. The more you pollute the planet, the more aggressive the local wildlife will become agitated with you and want to shut you down.
Factorio is played from a top-down, real-time strategy perspective. The game is remarkably well optimized—so much so that you can have a gigantic factory base with thousands of individual moving parts, and PC performance still won’t suffer (unless you have a total potato).
The art style is pleasant to behold in a minimalistic way. It’s easy to see how your factory base stands out from the natural environment. This, in turn, goes along with the narrative that you, as the alien, don’t mesh well with the planet you’ve landed on. The locals certainly don’t think so. Factorio never gets into any preachy moral discussions about climate change nor any finger-wagging about pollution in general, but the game’s visuals let you know that you are actually the villain of this new world, rather than the hero.
I also really enjoy Factorio’s sound design with regards to how it scales. When your factory is relatively small, you can hear much more of the ambient sounds of the environment. But once you get things really cranking and your factory is a sprawling labyrinth of machinery, you’ll mostly hear lots of loud machinery. The background music isn’t bad but isn’t particularly memorable either.
Factorio is also very mod-friendly with a large modding community that has sprung up around it over the game’s lifetime. These mods range from basic ones that merely expand on the already established formula, to hyper-complex ones that make it extremely challenging (and time-consuming) to build a decently-sized factory base.
Factorio is a highly polished factory-building game that has a really great premise and execution, nice visuals, and great sound design. It’s basically a must-have for any fans of building games.
RATING: 8.4/10
Factorio has some great graphics so you’ll need a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. Therefore, you may just want to invest in a superior gaming rig:
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