"It's like Satisfactory!"
"It's like Factorio!"

Well... yes and no. If you're a fan of the aforementioned games (I am) then you'll be at home with Mindustry. But Mindustry is not Satisfactory and it is not Factorio. I don't know of any other factory game quite like Mindustry.

At it's simplest, Mindustry is a factory + tower defense + RTS game. In some campaign missions you'll be playing defense (waves of enemies spawn in at set points). In other missions, you're on offense: you will build a victory fleet and crush your enemy.

The game offers two campaigns. The original ("classic") campaign is complex and sprawling. The player must juggle a world divided into sectors where each sector is a map. You can transition between sectors you own at any time. Some sectors are campaign missions: you can play them when you've met the technology requirements. All other sectors are optional and can be attacked when you own an adjacent sector. The enemy AI will attack sectors you own. The player must balance all this in real time. All sectors are always "running," that is, they are always generating (or losing!) resources, even if you're not in that sector. The game offers summary reports to help manage this cognitive load.

The second campaign is more traditional: you'll play from mission to mission. Both campaigns are interesting and fun in their own ways.

While the second campaign is refreshing, the true delight is the classic campaign. It forces you to build a massive world-spanning economy of sectors. You use launch pads to send resources from your sectors to sectors where the fight is hottest. When you attack an optional adjacent sector, you can only take the resources in the sector from which you're attacking. Just like in real life, this means you need to stage your resources before you attack (an optional sector). Through intuitive gameplay, the game encourages the Player to encircle the enemy by taking optional sectors. The enemy will be doing the same to you. The more optional sectors your take and build up, the stronger your planet-wide war machine becomes.

But enough of the meta: at it's most basic, Mindustry is a factory game where you extract resources, convert them into more complex products, and deliver them to where they are required. Sometimes you send them to your Core. Sometimes you send them to the front lines to feed your turrets. Sometimes you send them to factories that produce units.

Yes, the game has advanced blueprints. You will use them.

Like Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander before it, units come in tiers. A tier 1 unit can be upgraded to a tier 2 unit, and so forth. Each tier requires more complex products. Like Supreme Commander, the end-tier units are truly massive in scale (on par with SupCom's "Experimental" units).

At first, unit control is traditional. You select units and tell them where to go and what to attack. Eventually, you'll notice that you can construct buildings that allow custom AI scripts. The game offers an (acceptable) in-game IDE for developing these scripts (called "mlogic"), which permit complex unit behaviors. For example, you can write a simple script that tells all your gunships to attack specific target categories but fly back to healing towers when they are low on health. You can write a script that converts combat aircraft into resource ferries. You can write a script that tells gunships to stick around an artillery tower and attack anything that comes within its range. The possibilities are endless.

I suppose the elephant in the room is the game's graphics. At first, I also found them to be "too simple." But once gameplay gets complex, you stop noticing. The incredible scale of the wave 150+ assaults with lasers, projectile gun fire, missiles, artillery, etc, makes the TA/SupCom fan in me rejoice. This game "gets it."

The soundtrack is incredible. I love the synth vibe.

For it's price, I don't think there's another factory game on Steam that offers the same value. The fact that it's open source is the icing on the cake. Yes: you can go play this for free. I'd recommend picking up the Steam edition though, for cloud saves/automatic updates/etc.