Early Access Review

I find Minecraft to be too artistic and doesn’t have enough engineering in it, even with those beautiful creations people have made (such as working vehicles with pistons) it just doesn’t give me a deep love. I just care more about the functional design of something over the artistic look of it.Enter Factorio. Minecraft for the engineer. Well it’s not even Minecraft, but this is an engineering game, and I’ll tell you flat out, this review might be completely subjective. I find engineering games to be amazingly fun. Infinifactory is brilliant, in fact, all of Zachtronics’ games are perfect in my eyes. Well maybe not Ironclad Tactics, but that’s another story.Factorio though is for me what Minecraft is to almost everyone else, it’s a playground filled with ideas and experimentations that make me want to try new things.The idea of Factorio starts out similar to Minecraft, and I promise that’s the last comparison between these games. The player needs to go get wood by cutting down a tree. As long as he can find a tree (Which shouldn’t take very long) he can build a pickaxe, from there the game opens up. He can find many resources ( coal, stone, iron, and copper) and he can dig those up.This is a slow process, the pickaxe only will dig up one unit a second and the player has to stand still for it. This is one of the big differences between Factorio and almost any game. The game pushes the player to build a furnace, smelt iron plates out of the iron oven, and start assembling “burner drills” right away.Burner Drills are drills that run on coal, they automatically drill up ore (or coal) as long as they have coal in them. They also “export” whatever ore they drill up in one of the four cardinal directions. All of a sudden the player no longer has to drill or dig up the ore. They just have to wait and collect it after a little while. They can even run multiple drills at a time.There’s really one more step that’s required. The player should find water ASAP and from there, start digging up coal and build a boiler, and steam engine. The boiler takes coal and water and makes steam. The steam engine creates electricity. Electricity powers… EVERYTHING!Ok, maybe not “Everything” Some pieces like cars will run on coal, but the player can start developing a “Base”. Instead of the wasteful Burner Drills, they can start employing Electric Mining Drills. These run off electricity and are far more efficient than the Burner Drills. They can use Conveyors (Which never need power) to deliver the Coal to different locations. They can employ inserters (grabbing arms that move objects from one place to another) to place the coal and other ore into machines, like the boiler, or furnaces or to take the finished products from a furnace and place them in a chest or another conveyor.With a little research they can eventually create assemblers, machines that will take parts of a larger object and build them itself, such as assemblers which might take iron plates and make iron gear wheels, then take those gear wheels and copper plates and make science packs which are used for research to figure out other technology. They might make ammo for defensive weapons automatically, and then they can even deliver them to the guns as necessary.Factorio gives you the tools to make all of these. The player is never told they can not do something, or if they are they are limited, they usually have a way to get there (through research).The thing is the idea might seem simple, and it is. However, Factorio assists this by building the idea of the entire world. While the player is limited to one map, that map is quite large. Often times, not every required feature is within reach of the user. There might be a limit to an iron deposit, or a uranium deposit isn’t close by, or so on. The game allows the player to create even deeper logistic systems such as automated trains that will run between points and deliver products between locations. It’s up to the player's imagination and resources to develop a working economy.One nice thing about Factorio is the player rarely has to commit to a choice. If he’s building a base and forgets something he can pull up the entire base and lay it out differently. There’s no penalty for a bad placement of an object except time. If the player wants to replace a furnace, he gets that furnace back, the same with conveyors, electrical poles, and inserters.So if an iron deposit runs out, and the train tracks to that location are no longer needed, the player can pull up the entire tracks, the original base that was mining the ore, and place everything somewhere else. The game also plays pretty fast and loose with the size of objects so while there are limits to how much the player can carry, it’s large enough that it might only take two or three trips for very large bases when everything stacks.The one thing I feel is lacking in factorio is a great way to start. There is a first steps campaign which shows some of the early parts of the game. However, that barely teaches anything. The New Hope campaign seems to be where the game wants you to go so you can learn bigger pieces. The campaign has large and interesting missions. Well, at least the first two. The third mission in New Hope is just terrible. I’m sure I could finish it if I really tried but it’s painfully hard and just not as polished as I expected.At that point, I tried free play. You design the world (how many minerals, how many enemies, aggressive levels, difficulty) and then are placed in it to do anything you want. The campaign mode didn’t allow any achievements to be earned, the achievements are only earned in the free play mode. An odd choice, but one that is great, because the free play mode is the meat of the game, and is quite fun. This is the mode that most survival games go for, just an expansive open area to play.Once you start free play you likely won’t go back, the whole free play is about building a rocket and the entire game is so well set up. Even though the game says “Go build a rocket” there are a hundred things to do, to research, to develop before you can reach that point. Each of these goals is like a mini checkpoint, and it is so enjoyable to automate development of the second science packs or get a good flow so you can have steel constantly be developed for you. These aren’t massive milestones, but they trigger that part in my brain that made me go “one more turn” in Civilization, or “Let me just fix one more thing” when building in MinecraftThe real problem of factorio is that it doesn’t teach everything in a solid way, there’s so much more to learn and the fact is not everything is obvious.However update .17 is coming, and many of my concerns should be fixed I’ve stopped playing in anticipation of that and wanted to wait for that before I publish a full review.At the same time, I’m writing this review when the game is 20 dollars, and it is about to rise to 30 dollars. The developers claim no sales will ever happen, but I wanted to recommend this game. Either 20 or 30 dollars is a great price for how much enjoyment this game has brought me and will bring to me. I look forward to the future of this game and look forward to the final released version that should be coming around the corner. So I recommend this game if you like the idea of playing with automation or developing large machines.I apologize for the brevity of the review. There’s far more to discuss and I have more to say, but Steam has limitations on the size of reviews. If you want to hear more from me, you can show me that by following my curator at http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31803828-Kinglink-Reviews/ . If I hit 100 followers I’m planning on taking the next step and creating a website so I can have as much space as games warrant.