Factorio

So you build a factory to produce things to fight off aliens. If that idea is not appealing to you: don't buy the game. If it sounds great, you get everything you ever wanted. Factorio has that bad way of bringing that idea to your mind: "What if I build this factory a little different?" and you are lost again in several hours in this game, just to come up with an even better idea afterwards. Soon those aliens are nothing more than an annoyance, an alibi-goal you need to explain why you just spent a whole week designing a factory to mass-produce everything there is in this game in the most efficient way. And why you probably do it the next week all over again. While this gameplay-idea is done with excellence in this game and keeps you excited if you like it, it also lacks many other things. Once you built your first few factories and got the idea, you can either build a more efficient one, or just wait a few more minutes to finish the level. This game lacks any motivation to build a better factory except for your own drive to do it. Some say this is a good thing, because everything else would be unnecessary, others find this game just plain boring after a while. So if you are that guy that spent hours with automation mods in Minecraft, or just love improving automation for any other reason: this is the game for you. If you seek for deep and compelling gameplay just an inch away from that, you won't find it in this game.

I really wouldnt buy this on GOG currently. It seems like we are a few updates behind, we have to login to get those updates and register with a valid key on their website. BTW my game still didnt update to the latest version when this was done. I really wanted to play this game and support the developers. Now i really wished i waited for a sale or didnt buy this game at all. Really upsetting the road blocks they put in the way on the game even when its meant to be DRM-Free. At the moment i would not recommend buying this game until they remove that feature and give us the current update/release.

This game is a true masterpiece - one of the few in my excessive gaming career to give me multiple thousands of hours of incredibly rewarding play. In retrospect, for the enjoyment I have gotten, I would happily pay five times as much as I originally did for the game. I would frame Factorio primarily a logistics, puzzle, and building game. You work to build systems of systems of systems to achieve goals that, in many ways, are self-defined. I have worked with friends to build sprawling bases, worked with my (less-gaming) s/o to dive deep into optimization problems, and spent countless hours alone digging into the next innovation by which I can enable the factory to grow. (A current favorite modded mode is to focus on exploring, colonizing, and exploiting other solar systems with Space Exploration.) The customizability of Factorio, from the game settings to the incredibly robust modding community allows you to essentially define your own game. My friends and I have taken on incredibly difficult deathworld games where we were desperately fending off hordes of invading biters with every shred of explosives we could scrape together. But I've also played slow games using mods like Angels and Bobs where it was a very deep puzzle, searching for the next tier in my production chain. I have built up a library of extremely carefully craft recipes representing huge amounts of effort, but I also regularly throw wads of duct tape at a problem. The team responsible for creating this game has elevated video game development to an art form only rarely seen and has been obsessive in maintaining it. The only thing I could ask further from the Factorio team is that they take a vacation and stop pushing out bug fixes so quickly - it often takes a day or less to go from a community bug report to a deployed fix. (The low reviews for the GoG update system do not make sense to me. The game features an integrated update system, allowing me to keep up to date with all current releases.)

...because to review it, I have to stop playing it first. This isn't your typical "craft stuff" game. Oh, you can manually mine your basic elements at first: stone, coal, iron, and copper. Then you can smelt iron and copper plates. But then, why not create coal-powered miners to work for you? And then a pump, boilers, and steam engines to get electricity going. Then some conveyor belts to get products moving around. And robot arms ("inserters") to move things on and off those belts. Later on, trains. And train signals as well, so you can automate your trains. At some point, you'll have so many conveyor belts that you'll despair of having more room to build. Enter the roboport, which hosts flying robots that can fly around fulfilling requests, so you can get a more flexible system. Oh, and it hosts construction robots as well, to build plans you lay and to do repairs for you. Oh, did I mention that all the while, the planet's native buglike species is trying to kill you? So you'll need to develop weapons too, from automated gun turrets to lasers to a tank with explosive shells. But aside from all that, what really makes this game is the intelligence with which it was written. Opening a stone furnace to retrieve newly-forged iron plates is tedious? No problem; just control-click to grab the plates as you run by. Laid all your conveyor belts in the wrong direction? No need to tear them up; just lay new belts over them in the correct direction and they'll replace the originals (which will go back into your inventory). Replacing an early robot-arm inserter with a more advanced model, or a slower furnace with a faster one? Just stick the new one right on top of the old one and it seamlessly replaces it. Find yourself building the same set of things over and over? Make a blueprint out of them and have your robots build it for you! This game is deep and amazing. If you're a programmer or an engineer, it'll suck you in and not let go.

Truly a MUST buy, but beware Factorio is a dangerous game, itll eat up your time like nothing (2800+ hours as of writing, ON GOG :) ) You'll start small, then destroy your base and rebuild it, AGAIN and again angai..... ad infinitum it will never be done, and youll like it. Whats the worst though is that this game has mod support, if you thought making a base in 50+ hours was fast, try adding BobAngel+Madclown etc to the game and you will find that 500+ will just be the start of it all. Infinite FUN. PS: OCD sufferers beware this will be the last game youll buy, unless you want it all in 3D to SATISFy your fACTORIo needs ;)