Game Review: Satisfactory
A creature reminiscent of a manta ray soars overhead as the sun falls softly on a large field of flowers. Next to the field sits a rumbling machine that is belching black smoke into the sky, pulling in copper ore and pushing out copper ingots. I stand there, staring at the smelter’s production data, puzzling out what steps I’d need to take to fix my output flow. The copper ore has backed up all the way to the ore extractor, and the smelter isn’t converting ore into copper ingots as fast as the extractor is pulling them from the ground. It was at this point I needed to ask myself, am I having...fun? And the answer was yes. Somehow, the development team behind Satisfactory has taken a process engineer’s year one exam problems and turned them into a game that is way more fun than my description can convey.
Satisfactory, currently in early access, is an open world crafting game, in the same genre as Minecraft and No Man’s Sky. While games of the same pedigree tend to spread themselves thin in terms of features, Satisfactory hones in on a single aspect of the genre: crafting. Satisfactory expands crafting into a complex and rich experience far beyond other open world crafting games. Instead of having the player move earth and stone, digging downward, Satisfactory concerns itself with building out the infrastructure for processing resources into more complex items, spread out along the surface of the world.
The first thing you notice about Satisfactory is how good it looks. The art of this game was clearly a priority, and the attention to detail continued to surprise me in the best ways. I first noticed this in the fact that your hand-tools strap flaps in the wind of your descent to the planet’s surface. The variety of detailed alien creatures inhabiting the gorgeous landscapes with strange and beautiful plant life makes it clear the development team wants the user to experience their world in full fidelity.
Gameplay starts out with the player selecting a location for their hub, and completing construction of the different features of the hub act as tutorial without putting the player into forced cutscenes or unnecessary exposition. The tasks are basic, having the player collect resources and constructing buildings, which unlock ways to process those resources into items that can be used to construct more complex items and structures. Once the hub is completed, the player is given access to tier 1 upgrades, and each tier of upgrades can be unlocked by spending resources of increasing complexity. Conveyor belts lead to vertical lifts. New recipes for your biomass reactor will allow you to get more energy output per unit of fuel. Each upgrade leads to greater efficiency of the system, which in turn leads to rumination on how to perform each task better.
Where the game falters is tone. It wasn’t clear what message or theme the developers were trying for. Where in games like Factorio it becomes clear that your machines are destroying the environment in the name of progress, in Satisfactory the environmental impact is either non-existant or not apparent. Satisfactory drapes itself in themes of poking fun at world destroying capitalism, where your fictional corporate sponsor Ficsit (pronounced “fix it”) sends you off to pristine worlds and demands the return of their investment through resources, but the theme seems more for justifying gameplay and less any sort of cohesive narrative.
When Satisfactory shines, though, it really shines. One of the best indications that an open world crafting game is worth its salt is when a player can look into the distance and see some geological feature that interests them, and then can set off to go see that thing. Satisfactory gave me multitudes of gorgeous and interesting things to look at, and so I decided to put this to the test by going to look at a waterfall on top of a mountain that appeared miles distant. After being chased through the forest by an acid spitting alien, finding a bacon flavored mushroom, looking at trees that I first believed were hot air balloons, and jumping over several crevasses, I reached the top of the mountain I had viewed so long ago. Near the top was a cave, and entering that cave I found a large red glowing crystal resting on a pedestal. Grabbing the crystal, I examined it in my inventory, where it stated in all caps “THIS ITEM IS NOT YET COMPLETE”.
Well, not everything is finished in early access it seems, but what is there has got me hooked.
-The Clever Coyote