Satisfactory
PC
Here, the sky really is the limit. This open-world factory builder’s modus operandi might be reminiscent of Factorio, but the addition of the third dimension in Satisfactory changes everything. When building your empire, you can choose to construct upwards into the great wide yonder – even to the point of breaking the game, we’re told. Sounds like a challenge.
The encouragement of this mischievous ambition in its playerbase seems about right for Coffee Stain Studios, the maker of Goat Simulator. This is easily the biggest challenge the studio has yet set itself, comprising not only complex three-dimensional building, crafting and movement systems but also online multiplayer in a persistent world. It’s a characteristically precocious goal, and all the evidence suggests that it’s about to pull it off – with the help of a gaggle of early access players – in some style.
With its firstperson perspective and defiantly lush vistas, even on a purely visual level Satisfactory feels like a sorely needed refresh of a dusty old genre. The alien planet you’re in charge of pillaging in your quest to complete the mysterious Project Assembly looks like it was quietly asked to leave No Man’s Sky for making the other planets feel insecure. From verdant forests to glittering deserts, each of its many biomes is distinct. You’re given a choice of location upon starting your factory: while building among forest is a great option for beginner players, offering biomass to fuel early-game structures with, braver or more experienced players might opt for the wide-open real estate of the desert. The latter is less immediately bountiful, but allows you to get on with building instead of demanding you first level out wonky terrain.
While the gathering and crafting of materials within these luminous locales will,
no doubt, be about as gently entertaining as games of this type tend to be, the building is on an entirely different level. Well, several of them. The freedom to stack structures on top of each other combined with the player’s perspective means that Coffee Stain has had to employ some clever design tricks.
In firstperson, placing down ore smelters and freehanding twisty conveyor belts quickly becomes an issue when you’re trying to think in terms of the bigger picture. Constructing climbable watchtowers in strategic positions is one way to get a more traditional top-down view of your factory. But when there are various floors to mentally juggle, the jetpack becomes an essential means of dipping and diving through your labyrinth of industry to make extemporaneous tweaks.
In fact, there’s far more to movement in Satisfactory than you’d ever expect from a
Adds a crucial twist of colour, personality and even intimacy that has long eluded the genre
factory sim. These interconnected structures can soon grow to a dizzying scale on a planet that’s 30 square kilometres, and so Coffee Stain has provided an array of methods by which players can catapult themselves across their creations. Jump pads have already been toned down significantly since their initial inclusion, but will still send you hurtling many metres; conveyor belts, meanwhile, don’t just function as a means of getting resources from A to B, but can also be used as speed-boosting sprint tracks.
We will undoubtedly see Satisfactory’s early-access players beginning to branch out into homebrew activities within the game – parkour races are certainly within the realms of possibility, and Coffee Stain’s own makers admit that one of the first things they did was use factory parts to design Trackmania- style courses on which to race vehicles.
Quite apart from the myriad latent creative possibilities here, Satisfactory looks highly likely to provide the same bizarre supermechanised gratification that Factorio did for serious sim builders, while adding a crucial twist of colour, personality and even intimacy that has long eluded the genre – and could tempt in a whole new breed of builder keen to call Coffee Stain on its cheeky dare.