Review Day: Satisfactory (PC)

Satisfactory is the best game I've played in 2024 and will appeal to anyone who likes planning, digging holes on the beach, or Minecraft. It's a member of the "factory sim" genre, and plays out like a way-more-chill version of Factorio.

You play as the Pioneer, sent down to a pristine planet to harvest resources, mine ores, and send finished goods back up the Space Elevator (and in fact, one of your first major assignments is to build the Space Elevator). Your very first, simplest assignment will have you smelting iron ore into ingots and stamping them into rods and plates, while frantically chopping down enough wood to keep your electricity grid online. Assignments get more complicated at a steady, accessible pace until you have factories with dozens of machines, conveyor belts criss-crossing the world, and trains and drones carrying resources everywhere. Your power grid will evolve from simple biomass burners to automatic coal power plants to nuclear reactors, and late-game incorporation of alien technologies will take things in weird directions, with teleportation portals and volatile augmentations that spike your output while using exponentially more power.

The game is forgiving enough that you can play any way you want. You can choose to nerd out with paper and calculators to design a maximum efficiency factory or just wing it and build a factory that will get the job done eventually. You can load-balance your conveyor belts precisely to different machines or just dump the interim products on a conveyor belt and let it work itself out. Or, you can ignore the endgame entirely and be like the guy who built the Sydney Opera House from scratch in about 600 hours.

When you get tired of building, you can partake in some light exploration and combat (which is fleshed out enough to be engaging, but not so difficult that it's the point of the game). You might find rare resource nodes or mysterious artifacts that help in your factory. None of the major resources is limited and dying from wild beasts or a fall just respawns you.

The dopamine hits come from building something and making it work -- it's immensely satisfying to turn on a factory and see it start to spit out products from nicely-animated machines. It's equally rewarding to troubleshoot the emergent issues that occur when a factory isn't working quite right (this will be the more common case). Solving problems feels a lot like bug-hunting for software engineers and each playthrough is filled with AHA! moments, usually caused by earlier mistakes.

There's only a few flaws in the game: the controls can be a little finicky (and very rarely, buggy) but they're still way better than any of the finger juggling you have to do in Fallout 4 or Fallout 76. Also, the final phase of the game (Phase 5) feels a little underwhelming after the scaled complexity of Phase 4 -- where Phase 4 really felt like you had to learn many new things and run machines in parallel, Phase 5 can be solved with just a handful of serial machines. These nitpicks aside, Satisfactory is the only game that I've ever immediately started over (to try and be even more efficient with all the lessons I learned in the first playthrough). It will easily give you hundreds of hours of fun.

Maia loves watching me play this game and will choose it as a nightly activity over playing her own Switch games. She has built her own factories out of Legos and random items in our basement, and has become an expert helper in spotting machines that might be broken (based on the colors of their display lights or their animations). She's constantly creating paper diagrams of machines connected by conveyor belts and has learned the basics of pipeline fluid dynamics and how to calculate machine throughput. I can't wait until she has her own gaming computer and we can play together on a private multiplayer server.

Final Grade: A

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