Factorio: Space Age

Really liking everything about Space Age, its got Space! It's got lots of new technologies! Even more to do! However all this greatness is ruined by the disaster that is "Quality" and I don't mean quality of the game itself but the ingame new Quality feature added in with Space Age. It's an absolutely not thought out design that seems to have been tested by developers in a "dev build" with endless resources. Want to get a high quality item that gives weapons slightly better range or perhaps a miner that consumes less resources while mining? Well good news quality is for you except for the fact you have to craft thousands of "trash" just to get these slightly better items. What can you do with the extras? Well basically stockpile or recycle them(not all resources returned) which the recycler is gated research on another planet. Gee thx I got thousands of items that are completely worthless and when I can recycle them the return rate is so low I might as well just toss them at the biters. What would have been better is to provide a Quality upgrade loop of some kind instead of endless byproducts that waste your precious resources.

So, pricing here (Gog) is absolutely outrageous in comparison to other game digital stores! For example, in the famous game store (Steam) Factorio costs 300 Grivnas for both Original game and DLC - Space Age. It is mostly a fair price (country - Ukraine) for such a unique game. Personally, I think it is a little bit high (250 Grivnas is a much better price), but nevertheless, it is mostly fair! In comparison to the Steam price, Gog's price is - 17$ for the Original game and DLC. If converted to Ukrainian Grivnas - it is about 745 Ukrainian Grivnas, which is MUCH more than in another digital store. I understand that a DRM-free license is better for gamers but paying 2,48 times more only for a DRM-free license is absurd in today's realities. In addition to the high prices, there are no !Achievements! support in the Gog version of the Factorio (and DLC), which is simply nonsense for such a game! ***** Devs, Publisher, if you read my mini-review, please, make some adjustments in the Factorio (and a DLC) pricing, at least for Ukraine and Ukrainian gamers. Thank you for your attention and I hope for some changes in the near future (price adjustment and Achievements support in the Gog version).

Other worlds can be visited and left in less than 20 hours. But there are several of them. And the game warns you, that the final world is really hard, Nice! Another 100+ hours well spent.

But imo not worth the full price (again).

Factorio has always had balancing problems; be it poor item ratios, or the LAN first development leading to the alien threat being far stronger than it should reasonably be in single player. Space Age only exacerbates this. Not only have several technologies moved beyond the rocket launch which marked the original campaign's conclusion, but now there's more sideways development due to the introduction of things such as quality levels; which can at times, completely stuff up an operation on the whimsy of a dice roll. Each planet now features a new annoying gimmick, be it cold, resource spoilage, or other poorly thought out and executed means of artificially barricading content from players hands. For a game that expects you to play though the nose of 60+ hours of content before you can get to the new content, the price seems tall for such an expansion. Who knows, maybe the devs will hammer that out, but they tend to need to be pushed to hammer.