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Satisfactory review (early access)Coal-hearted
Coal-hearted
There it is, the trans-planetary pipeline. One long tube of metal scarring a rural alien planet. It brings coal and water to my power stations, and electricity to my factories. It has taken a day of planning, construction and pumping. Now, the pipeline stands before me, a snaking behemoth of energy consumption. Suddenly, a thought comes. Why didn’t I just build coal stations next to the vein? I could have stretched a cheap wire across the planet, instead of a kilometre-long death pipe.
This isSatisfactory, a cracking first-person factory-builder that’s been in early access on Epic for a while. It’s coming to Steam today, so RPS management dispatched me to inspect the game’s machinery and ruin the extraterrestrial idyll with smog and incompetence. They sent the right person.
Imagine if somebody shrunk you and injected you intoFactorioto oversee things close-up. That’s basically whatSatisfactoryfeels like to play. You’re a corporate peon, sent to fill the blue skies of this virgin world with smoke and its grasslands with machinery, all painted a garish bulldozer gold.
Mostly you will be plopping down mining machines over seams of iron, limestone, sulfur, copper, and so on. Then plopping down smelters to turn the ore into ingots, for example. Then plopping down constructors to turn the ingots into iron plates, or screws. Then plopping down assemblers to turn the iron plates and screws into reinforced plating. Then plopping down… well, you’re human, aren’t you? You understand what planet-killing looks like.
At least, so long as you’re not in multiplayer. Here the amount of bugs and glitches are “considerably higher”, say the devs. And there’ll be crossplay between Epic and Steam players, they add. I didn’t let strangers onto my planet, however, so I can’t tell you too much about multi-person factory life. Why you’d want an interloper in a game custom-made for control freaks, I do not know. Get off my smog rock.
This smokestack ‘em up may be the seafaring survival game’s spiritual opposite, a game of exploitation and resource pillaging, but it knows that, and it wants you to feel at least a little bad about what you’re doing. Why else would the creators fill the valleys with fascinating wildlife and gorgeous natural splendour? It is the prettiest first-person cookie clicker I ever done clicked.
There is a touch of fiddliness when it comes to building, but nothing crippling. Corpbot suggests embracing “verticality” when building, layering constructors and conveyors atop one another to make efficient use of space, but this is easier robo-said than human-done, and often ended with me running around trying to get the right angle to place something down just right. There is a handy “snap to guidelines” feature which helps you build in straight lines, but sometimes it didn’t want to play nice. It takes practice to plop tidily, and I haven’t done enough. I can already feel the scorn radiating from seasoned players who look at these screenshots and gag at the lack of foundation flooring below my machines. The dearth of right angles and order. But like I say, they can’t fire me.
There are also useful hidden features. For example, you can press Alt and scroll your mouse wheel to swap between 10 hotbars, all customisable. You can scroll your mouse wheel when building a conveyor belt to make it turn neatly, rather than snaking higgle-dee-piggedy all over the shop. But Corpbot never explicitly tells you those useful things. Or if it did, I missed it during all theBWOOOoooom. I only found out about this sort of thing on YouTube.
Hey! That’s probably why I ended up building a needless, kilometre-long pipeline! Yes, that’s it. It’s the game’s fault. I’m not an idiot. I pumped Evian-fresh water from the depths of a verdant forest up to my thirsty coal fields because Corpbot is not currently not good enough. Tsk, tsk, early access.
I have other (more reasonable) complaints. Observations is maybe a better word. Namely, how much time it demands. This is to be expected, it’s that sort of game, where incredibly useful time-saving devices are locked away, because the reward for unlocking them is saving yourself future-time, the most precious and un-pipeable resource.
There are smart splitter nodes, for example, that let you funnel resources between belts more intelligently. At their most basic, splitter nodes separate resources on a conveyor belt equally, in two or three directions, so having a machine that filters out all of one type of item is astoundingly handy. There are also trains that carry resources across huge distances on rails. No pipeline required! And a nippy buggy for getting across the surface, or at least the crappy ad-hoc roads you lay down. I didn’t get to any of that in 20 hours of funlabour, which to me is fine. As the pipeline incident suggests, I’m not the most efficient factory hand and I don’t mind ambling along cluelessly, anticipating how much more game there is to savour. But I suspect such time investment might make others sigh longingly and return to homeschooling maths.
Getting to that point takes time, a resource you cannot suck from the heart of any known slug. If you’ve already got lots of it, however, Satisfactory will likely fill your days with pneumatic bliss. It is a game about meaning well but soon taking perverse pride in the horrible eyesores you erect over a gorgeous planet. You will succumb to the disease of efficiency, if not the sore tummy of pipelinery. I went from building around the prettiest trees, to deforesting whole jungle plateaus to make way for my aquaduct and automated coal-shovelling system. Humans, I have heard it said, were a mistake.
Still, when you see those huge assembly lines, encircling mountaintops like a giant sushi conveyor belt, you’ll know they’re your crowning achievement. The game’s coffee-sipping mascot and punning monkier refers with confidence to these brief moments of pleasure you’ll feel when you finish a tumbling mess of machinery and stand atop a tower, nodding with self-approval at the blight you’ve made on the landscape. I am become factory, the destroyer of worlds.
