I am a veteran of automation.
I've built sprawling Factories while besieged by environmentalist insects.
I've Satisfyingly strip-mined worlds to feed the corporate machine.
I've built elaborate underground bases capable of withstanding the Techtonic shifts of economic angst.
I've Crafted Planets and Colonised Astro... space... things.

When I came across Foundry my first impression was: "Oh, it's a simple, polished automation game. Might be fun." Didn't give it much thought. Bought it on a whim after I'd ground out all the more interesting-looking games.

Then midway through our first play session I realised: this was completely relaxing. No stress, no fumbling with balancing or fiddling with awkward layouts. The worst thing was the conveyors and even then it was fine. It wasn't a chore to expand, wasn't tedious to build new factories. Aside from the gratuitous space required for the inserter-analogues (still always place things one square too close) it was just very chill.

Then I discovered the decorations and was like "oh hey I'll probably get some Minecraft stuff, maybe paint it and junk." No. No, the cosmetic stuff is so much more elaborate than that - honestly it's as elaborate as games that are explicitly designed to just make pretty bases. "Okay, that's pretty cool, I thought," but it wasn't quite enough to make Foundry stand out as more than what I expected.

Then we needed to expand mines. This involved explosives. Explosives are fun. Blowing up terrain is lots and lots of fun. You can knock the tops off mountains or dig abyssal pits into infinity. Even had some fun making a spiral conveyor - but then we encountered a mine so deep that it was genuinely 100+ blocks beneath us. Even using explosives and just chucking them into the pit it took several minutes to get there: that's not a sign of ineffective explosives so much as just how far it went. How do we get stuff up from there, I wondered? So I built an elevator... and here's where I turned into a gushing toddler for the next ten minutes.

You see, once you place an elevator you can make a new stop. Okay, I just have to dig down there and make a second elevator, right? Wrong. You tell it the depth (or height) and it will automatically build itself to that area for you. You get to watch as it, section by section, digs through the earth down that 100+ blocks to create a comfy way to travel into a mine so deep that you can barely see it from the surface. I cannot stress how cool this was to see in action. Thanks to the elevator setting up the mine - a process that would've taken dang near an hour if I'd done it by hand, took mere minutes and it was fun the whole way through.

That was only the beginning, really, as we started unlocking other techs that had some similar functions. Modular (aka customisable) buildings, gigantic warehouses and vast resource sinks. Giant transport ships and drones buzzing through the sky to do my will - not in the Factorio sense where they replace all functions, but in the sense that they're building a giant metal wiener jutting into the sky because I can. It's like the space elevator from Satisfactory only built chunk by chunk by dozens of happy little robots.

Basically this game made me feel like a gushing child again and it's so easy to play that I'm just relaxed the entire time. It's not even hard to get resources where you need them because you can build conveyors underground so they never get in the way. Just large highways of the stuff that will never mess with the aesthetic of your base. Or you can do maximum conveyor spaghetti. Whatever tickles your fancy!

Oh, and the best part? Conveyor Belts don't move you when you stand on them. Like, by default. No tech, no fuss, no extra odd and end. Just being a happy little robot blowing up chunks of mountains, extracting vast amounts of wealth, petting your cute robot sidekicks and working towards a brighter future for the human race that is probably super extinct by this point but I don't care because at this stage I'm basically a Von Neumann probe strip-mining the galaxy for fun and more fun.

10/10. If games like Factorio or Satisfactory hadn't polished their stuff up I'd say that this does to the Automation genre what Grounded did to Survival Crafting Open World - that is: take the good bits, polish them to heck and make it cozy as all get-out to play, to the point where you're baffled that it's not the most popular thing in its genre.

Tell your friends. Tell your family. Buy your dog a copy. This game deserves more recognition.

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW
While I DO like the game itself so far, I DO NOT like the requirement to run an independent launcher + require extra Paradox services. I buy games on Steam because I can trust them for a cohesive and friction-free experience, having 3rd party terms and accounts is not something that should be encouraged for games on Steam. Additionally, the *external* terms include an unreasonable clause of "we can update these terms whenever without your consent or notification", which is never a good thing. It is a shame that Paradox is the only problem with this game, since the game itself has been so far enjoyable.

For Linux users: use Proton 8, Proton 9 causes crashes when attempting to use multiplayer functionality.

The dedicated server runs alright in plain old wine.

Update #1 (May 10):
The comments on this review are an interesting read if you want to hear both sides to the argument, I personally like the game *enough* that I am still playing it (so long as the terms of service don't get worse) but I just can't recommend it, because companies should not be allowed to change our legal rights without notifying us.

There's an active group on the game's discord that is doing work to port the dedicated server into a docker container and plenty of people discussing Linux support there as well. The devs *do* acknowledge Proton and Linux users so I'm not super worried about something like anti-cheat being added in later on that would break it.

They force you to install a Paradox Launcher which will send marketing info and diagnostics back to the devs.

Big no unless you want to waive your privacy