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Dyson Sphere Program is a must-play for factory game fansRobots in the skies
Robots in the skies
While I keep changing my mind about how much I personally enjoyDyson Sphere Program, there’s one thing I can say without hesitation: this is a bloody impressive piece of work. Despite being new into early access, it’s got a honkingly broad feature set already, and the sort of wildly ambitious premise you’d sneer away as a pipe dream, if it wasn’t implemented already.
That premise? To create an interstellar industrial empire, on a scale where you can capture entire stars and put them to work, like those poor dinosaurs which the Flintstones would imprison in their kitchen appliances. But great galactic oaks from little acorns grow, and this preposterous work begins with a single mech, walking about on a spherical 3D planet.
Dyson Sphere Program Release Date Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
Dyson Sphere Program Release Date Announcement Trailer
My first impression was this: here is the big bloke off ofTotal Annihilation, and he has invaded a game ofSpore, in order to bully some idiot worms (I guessPlanetary Annihilationwould have been the most apt comparison at that moment, but I’d never really played it much, so Total Annihilation vs Spore it was).
True to TA form, I made my mech geezer stomp about, disintegrating rocks and trees with his hands, and building mines and stuff with the accumulated matter. Then, the game started to coax me towards conveyor belts, and the production of arbitrary cubes which acted as research points, and it hit me immediately: this was aFactorio-’em-up.
Well, that’s glib of me. It’s a bit dated now to say that a factory game must automatically be likeFactorio. But only because Factorio has been successful enough to spawn a whole subgenre of factory games which ape it to a greater or lesser extent. DSP borrows broadly from several - most notably Daddy F himself, but also generally-agreed-upon runner up of the genreSatisfactory, and the more divergentAstroneer.
There are more esoteric influences that are still clear - the semi-automated trade routes of the Anno Series, for example, and of course Total/Planetary Annihilation, with the big robot geezer. Hell, Spore’s not even that silly of a comparison, given the way your progression in the game sees your industrial operation smoothly increase through orders of magnitude in scale, from planetary, to interplanetary, to interstellar.
But no: in fairness to developers Youthcat Studio (for real, I love that name), their game makes quite a few innovations of its own on top of the things that it borrows, and combines the strengths of many of its inspirations. The stacking, multi-layered conveyor belt systems, for example, are both intuitive to use, and far less of a nightmare than Factorio’s 2D spaghetti hell. Or at least, they’re a different, slightly more fun kind of nightmare.
It’s equally fair to say that Youthcat have made a few unnovations, too. The inability to rebind keys, for example, is a bit of a weird one, as is the frustrating one-way system imposed on rotating building footprints. If I’m being honest, the entire UI was riddled with small irritations for me, and I’d be glad to see it overhauled. But hey - these are exactly the sort of issues I tend to expect going into an early access release, and so it’s hard to be that down on them.
Looking ahead at more fundamental issues, I suppose I felt that DSP’s tech tree felt a little dry, overall. Clearly, I felt heavily motivated to get to the megascale, interstellar late game stuff, but this was not an immediate motivation. For a new player especially, DSP keeps you planetbound for an almost frustratingly long time. And while you’re waiting to emerge from the chrysalis of your initial gravity well and take flight as a majestic space butterfly, things can start to feel a little rote. The tech tree begins to feel like a series of boxes to tick off, and - perhaps because I’m a little burned out on Factorio recently - the creation of manufacturing lines for research-cube-things took on the air of a chore sooner than I wanted it to.
