There is so much to say about these games. First of all, value for money - it's quite reasonable to say each game will average you at least 5 hours to complete, and there's eight of them. Even if you only play through it once, 40+ hours of gameplay is well worth the price tag. The gameplay is fantastic and involves many different elements. To start with you need to carefully manage what you build in your starting town(s), rushing the Capitol for increased gold won't get you anywhere if you don't have any troops to buy with it. Choices become especially important on day 7, do you get your powerful unit or more of all your other units? Do you utilise the marketplace (at massive loss) for the few extra Crystals you need? Then there's weighing when you can take on mobs on the map, you start with a very small army which is usually not enough but clever tactics and some sacrifices might get you that Gold Mine a bit earlier. Then there's the heroes themselves, one or two of your allies will persist through the campaign so it's important to pick which ones will follow you, spread out experience and ensure they get the right abilities. It's not without its faults. There are Witches Huts that teach your heroes a specific ability but it doesn't tell you which until you visit it, and it just forces it onto the hero. As you can only have a limited number of skills, you'll find yourself save scumming to get the desired traits. Parts can be a chore without Town Portal and the Earth Magic skill on each hero. Magic is also a bit overpowered in the later missions. The early game "can I take that mob" dilemma becomes pointless when you can Chain Lightning away 3/4 of them on the first move. There's also a bug in one mission that allows the enemy heroes to pick up a horde of powerful monsters very early and confront you with an unstoppable force - you'll probably need cheats or memory hacks to overcome it. These are minor issues however, overall these are still fantastic games.
You know how you play Minecraft for a while and you start getting bored of spiders on your roof so you build a lava moat with a drawbridge? And you go really into detail with the drawbridge so it's got a XOR switch? And you wish you could do more but redstone is just such a pain to work with? Well, Factorio is for you! Say goodbye to your free time, you will literally dream of this game for a week after playing and struggle to focus on anything else. It's the sort of game you start playing after lunch and when you check your watch a few minutes later it's 4am. I must have eight or nine standard games under my belt now, a speed run will take maybe 7-8 hours for most and the average standard game is probably 40 hours. There are so many ways to play and each will feel like a different game. Hundreds of hours in, when you finally master the game and start getting bored, there are several "overhaul" mods by the community that force you to totally redesign everything you've done. That nice tidy column you've built? It now needs to be ten times the width and five times as long. Hope you had fun unloading two ores, there's now twelve. You'll be pulling your hair out all over again. A common mistake is assuming that Factorio is a simple game. The grungy 2D graphics and primitive grid placement are deceptive, anything you set up in this game is processing all the time. Unlike Minecraft, there is no zone around the player outside of which time stops. Tens of thousands of items being carted around on belts, thousands of inserters feeding thousands of machines, thousands of nasty bugs gnawing on your walls, all updating thirty times a second, and they somehow managed to get multiplayer working and connect over 400 players to a single game and keep it playable. There are no words for how incredible the code is behind this game and the devs are to be commended. Why are you still reading this? Just buy the damn game already =D
