This is a one-of-a-kind game: It's a crafting/exploration game without the tedium of manual resource harvesting and crafting. Whereas other games (Harvest Moon, Don't Starve, Minecraft) gradually give you better and better tools to make resource harvesting more efficient, Factorio never asks you to do tedious harvesting and crafting yourself. Instead, you build a factory network, always increasing in size and efficiency and complexity.

The player's role, then, is closer to the mayor of SimCity, or the programmer in a Zachtronics game like SpaceChem or Infinifactory. It's tremendous fun to make your factories, rail networks, and defenses expand, and pleasant to watch all the machinery going turn, turn, turn.

This is among my favorite games, and I keep coming back to it.

This is a one-of-a-kind game: It's a crafting/exploration game without the tedium of manual resource harvesting and crafting. Whereas other games (Harvest Moon, Don't Starve, Minecraft) gradually give you better and better tools to make resource harvesting more efficient, Factorio never asks you to do tedious harvesting and crafting yourself. Instead, you build a factory network, always increasing in size and efficiency and complexity. The player's role, then, is closer to the mayor of SimCity, or the programmer in a Zachtronics game like SpaceChem or Infinifactory. It's tremendous fun to make your factories, rail networks, and defenses expand, and pleasant to watch all the machinery going turn, turn, turn. This is among my favorite games, and I keep coming back to it.