Recent reviews by Tegid

Good, short puzzle game with a great style.

It's not really a factory game - you can arrange the machines to automate stuff but there's no logistics.

However, it does deliver some interesting puzzles, surprises, and a unique experience. I'm glad I played it.

Somehow, they fixed every complaint I had about Reus 1.

* It's now turn based, which is much less stressful. Also means it's easier to save/load the longer games.
* No labyrinthine aspect upgrade tree. Has drafting instead, which I think presents more interesting choices.
* No greed mechanic penalising us for getting "too good".

TL;DR: It's not a bad game. It has a lot of good points, but it has a lot of frustrating points too. It really depends on if the frustration gets you more than the fun.

I'd give this a neutral review if I could. I really want to like Satisfactory. I'm making this negative and going to specifics, so if you're on the fence then look at the points below and see if you think my frustrations would effect you too, but if my concerns sound silly to you then you may find a lot of fun here!

Now the wall of text!

Bad points:
* Building things is fiddly. This is the main core problem. Factory games are about building big factories, and it feels like most of my time was actually placing things instead of designing my factories. Based on some of their dev blogs this is partly intentional, so it won't go away with updates.
* Positioning is a hard in 3D as you have to keep moving to get a good view.
* Each machine requires a lot of extra things manually connected to actually work: belts in and out, splitter and merger for those belts, power cable to the machine, power pole nearby (at first you two a pole for every two machines), and probably a foundation to stand on. Compare to Factorio where you just need two inserters and a power pole vaguely nearby.
* Everything has to be explicitly connected (belts can be in the right place but not connect)
* You must build things in the right order. Sometimes A snaps to B but B won't snap to A, and sometimes you have to build a temporary C to build B to build A.
* It wants you to build with verticality but you can't easily move stuff up or down.
* There are blueprints but it's small (some machines don't even fit in it), and you must build them in the designer first rather than copying what you already made. And you still have to connect your blueprint to belts/power manually. To be fair, the size limit does make for interesting machine layout puzzles.
* Unbuilding things is fiddly too. Machine holds full stacks of ingredients, so your inventory fills with junk fast, then leftovers make in-world crates in potentially annoying places you must to empty separately. Moving my iron furnaces 8m sideways is what finally made me stop my first solo game.
* Logistic options are fiddly. Trucks, trains, and drones all exist but they're such a faff to set up I just stuck with long belts. Trains for example require huge stations, and then the belt ports don't work while loading/unloading, so the actual throughput goes down with more frequent trains.
* Transport options are fiddly. For personal movement there's ziplines, hypertubes, and two jetpacks, but they also each have problems. Ziplines for example should be good, but withou the big power towers you'd have to keep dodging the poles every few seconds. The electric jetpack can hover so it should be good for building around your factory, but it takes a full second to stop moving so you can place stuff precisely.
* Enemies are fiddly (ish). Unlike Factorio, combat here is more traditional and you need to aim and dodge, which isn't necessarily bad but it adds to the stuff distracting from core building gameplay. (There's an option to make enemies passive, maybe I should have used it...)
* Several menus sort by the order you discover things, which can leave them in a seemingly meaningless order later. This is most annoying on the Dimensional Depot, but also messed up my Object Scanner.
* At the start, you have to keep collecting leaves and wood to keep your power running, instead of planning and building things. I recommend keeping your factory very small until you get coal power.
* It's really long. Really long. It took me 165h to finish, and I've played EA so I kinda knew what I was doing.
* There's no formal post-game, like Factorio's repeatable sciences. I was happy to stop at the end, but if I had wanted more it would have been rather aimless. I know some player are good at setting their own goals in a sandbox, but I'm sadly not one of them.
* There's a few bugs around. I keep hearing a noise as I move between biomes, I ended with 5 dismantle crates that I couldn't reach, and I had to play with a launch arg for DX11 because the intended DX12 crashes.

Some specific good bits too:
* The world looks amazing. It's all handcrafted not procedural, there's a lot of biomes, lots of colour and exotic nature, lots of caves and vistas to find. You also get a fair amount of decorate options for your factories.
* Music and sounds are good too.
* It's got good humour. I was always looking forward to hearing ADA's comments and reading object descriptions as I made progress.
* Machine GUI is good, some gui panels have levers and big switches which are just fun to use.
* More complex crafting. There's ~150 parts compared to ~50 in Factorio, so production chains are more complex and some specific steps are more convoluted. For someone who's already played factory games, this is the real "more content" bit.
* Alternate recipes are a great addition. You gradually unlock random alternate ways to craft parts, which means your production chains can change and improve over time. Working out production chains is the fun part of the game, and unlocking alts means you don't have to keep copying the same solutions forever. The in-game recipe library makes it easy to navigate these.
* Multiple progression mechanics - unlike Factorio's science, Satisfactory has Phases (needing special parts), Milestones (needing normal parts), multiple tech trees in the "MAM", and the alt recipes mentioned above.
* Specifically compared to Factorio, it doesn't have enemies attacking your buildings (they attack you, and are maybe harder to deal with) and it doesn't have enemies getting stronger over time (though there are stronger areas). If you disliked that in Factorio, you may appreciate their absence here.

For some context:
* I played a lot of Factorio before this, and I came to Satisfactory expecting "Factorio but 3D". That maybe skewed my opinion, this obviously isn't Factorio but it wasn't immediately obvious how it's different.
* A friend bought this for 4 of us to play together (thanks spud!). It was v0.7, we got burned out collecting leaves to feed the biomass burners. I thought it'd get better after coal, so I played solo in v0.8, got much further but was too frustrated to stick it out to the very end. v1.0 added some UX improvements and the impending Factorio expansion got me hype for factory building, so I started a new save on v1.0.

Quite simply a solid metroidvania. Every aspect is amazingly polished: gameplay, art, sound, atmosphere, storytelling. It has a great sense of exploration, you can frequently explore old areas with new tools to find new things, and the map helps you track things you want to visit later.

The only bad bit was a specific crazy hard boss, the Watcher Knights. There are many crazy hard optional bosses which is good, but the Watcher Knights aren't optional which can be frustrating.

Note that there's a great wikia[hollowknight.wikia.com] for this game, but since the game is all about exploration I suggest not looking until you're really stuck.

So good I played it again.

Special mention goes to the sound - they've synced up the music to gameplay, which is amazing. Note that it is a management game rather than an action game, takes about 5 hours to finish.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is satisfying, but more than that is theory crafting builds. There are nearly 200 skills which you modify with up to 5 of around 100 supports; more unique items than you can think of, many offer build-altering properties. When I write this I have played lost 2500h to this game, and I've still got more builds ideas to try.

It can be daunting to get into, and there's some third-party stuff you need to get the most out of it.
the wiki[pathofexile.gamepedia.com] and an build planning tool[github.com] to plan a build, and the trading site[poe.trade] to find the items you need from other players. However, I recommend ignoring all that at first and just playing around with the stuff you find, making a new character when you can't progress further. It'll take longer to reach the end game but it'll be so much more satisfying than simply following an online build, and since it's not really multiplayer you don't have to worry about being competative.

GGG are constantly adding to the game, so there's something new to try every few months

And it's proper F2P - you can only buy cosmetics. Well, you can by stash tabs, but you start with plenty of space to reach the end game and decide if it's worth the $15 for the stash tab bundle, and they go on sale regularly. If you need more stash space, you've probably played this more than any other $15 game you've tried.

XCOM, but without the randomness.

Like XCOM, you play a series of turn based tactical missions on randomised maps, with a world map and team progression that ties them together. Missions take 1-2 hour, maps are procedurally generated, there's one main objective that gives you something useful (a super loot container, a super shop terminal, an agent to rescue, etc.), loads of other things to loot on the way, threats to avoid, and one teleporter you escape through. There's a lot of variety to keep each mission interesting.

Big difference 1) Once you're in a mission there's no randomness. Guards follow fixed patterns; they don't teleport around until you spot them; your shots never miss (neither do theirs...), you can normally spot every surprise before it happens (peeking through doors and around corners, peeking at guard to see where they move next). It can be challenging but it's always fair and it feels like every mission is doable if you play it right and you don't get greedy (which is really impressive given that it's procedurally generated).

Big Difference 2) Semi-ironman with the Rewind mechanic. If you make a mistake (or just missclick, I did that a lot), you can rewind back to the start of your previous turn. You only have limited uses per mission (3 on normal, 1 on hard, you can set it to 0), so it's not a free ticket (it's a very expensive ticket) and you can't use it to cheat RNG because there is no RNG. I think it's a great for people like me without the time or patience for real ironman modes but do like have decisions matter.

Oh, and the 2D art and animation looks beautiful.

Edit: I recommend the UI Tweaks mod (http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=581951281), doesn't break achievements but does fix a few things.

I usually dislike puzzle games because they're usually solvable by brute force. The two exceptions I've played are SpaceChem (or anything by Zachtronics), and Antichamber.

Antichamber cannot be solved with brute force. To use brute force you need rules to limit your options to a small set, but Antichamber doesn't tell you all the rules, and sometime you don't even have the right tool. The puzzle is in working out the rules, and working out what aren't rules (Euclidean geometry for example!), and sometimes giving up until you get the next tool. Once you've worked out the rules, actually executing the solution is usually easy; after a while you can move through the world pretty fast.

It never cheats though: while the game goes to great lengths to abuse the assumption you bring to it, it never breaks it's rules once they're established.

Also worth noting that the sights and sounds are amazing, though your mileage may vary with the abstractness. I found it surprisingly comfy, and the ending is possibly one of the best I've experienced.

PS: It took me about 6h to finish the game, I've logged 12h because I played it again!