Factorio

I bought Factorio 2 years ago on Steam, and while the game is still in early access mode I consider it a polished product that has given me 100's of hours of fun (477 hrs on Steam and counting!). It is one of those games that you can come back to once or twice each year and play for a few 100 hrs and put it aside again. The concept is simple, you mine resources and build increasingly complex structures in order to automate production lines with the final goal of building a spaceship to escape the planet. In the mean time your industry generates pollution which causes the local monsters to attack you, so you need to build up your defences and you will have to expand to find more resources, building a logistics network with trains to transport resources from far corners of the map to your base. After playing through the vanilla version, there are hundreds of community created mods available for you to try out that range from making life easier (better defensive structures, weapons, vehicles, logistics, ...) to adding harder enemies, adding more complex crafting formulas by introducing new resources and intermediates etc... With these mods you can make small changes to the game to improve your game experience or completely change how it plays. All the mods are easily installed using the ingame interface after creating an account on the Factorio website. I am buying this game again on GoG because my kid is playing too often locking me out from my Steam account and I want to support the game developers for creating one of the best games I have ever played.

SUMMARY Factorio is a 'clever logic' game, without thousands of pages of what you need to do or painful tutorials. Persistent world, sandbox, build-a-base redefined. GAMEPLAY The mechanics tempt your basic human desire to want more and better things, blended with a twist of grit and topped off with the spice of survival. OVERALL Factorio is a real gem and very hard to put down. I could sit here for days writing a review. If you are bored of everything else out there or play them for 20 mins and get bored, play this game. I simply had no choice but to write a review since the UI was updated (not sure when that happened but it looks and feels so much better). I can now play the game without feeling overwhelmed by the complexity and diversity of all the different screens/menus. Everything feels uniform and appropriately located now. WARNING Factorio will leisurely devour your time, much quicker than you can devour it's offerings.

The game is great. Just great. Was a bit of a rocky start on GOG since i had to create an account on factorio.com and register my serial key before i could play. See more here: https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/214071085-Factorio?product=gog

Please note: I have purcheased the game before I registered on GOG. As other reviews pointed out, there might potentially be issues with the GOG version. Please get more info on this before you buy the game. As for the game itself, I absolutely love it. Here is a short list of the pros and cons from my point of view: Pros: - very relaxing (even with standard enemy settings), unlike MOBAs, RTS-games, etc. - can be played, dropped and picked up again at any point, unlike RPGs - a ton of quality of life features - focusses on puzzles / problem solving, but in a flexible way, as you can avoid a lot of trouble by planning ahead. (--> Always leave space to scale up production!) - lots of mods. I have only tried cosmetic ones so far, but those are nice. - great replay value (finished about 5-6 playthrough so far, each of which had 33-44 hours) Cons: - outdated graphics - combat controls are a little clunky - if you do not plan ahead enough (which can esaily happen to inexperienced players), the factory can get VERY messy at some point. This might be frustrating. (Check youtube for tips and tricks if you are stuck.) Neutral: - huge timesink. You might find yourself playing 3-4 hours in a row before you know it. If you have the time that means you'll have tons of fun. If you don't have the time, you might find progress to be quite slow - or you might go to bed waaaay too late.^^

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