icon Author: Mardo
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Satisfactory - Early Access Review
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Ever feel extra productive, yet you're completely tired? Wanna do something nice, create something useful, yet you don't even want to get up from your chair? Then Satisfactory is your perfect shot. Latest title from the Coffee Stain Studios, Swedish developer team with short games list so far, such as Sanctum and Goat Simulator. But if you would wish for another weird, fun thanks to its bugs game like the Goat Simulator, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Satisfactory is still in Early Access stage, but even right after showing up for public it was a HUGE step for the developer. It's full with content, has beautiful and eye pleasing, yet well optimized graphics and the most important part - can provide you surprisingly rewarding fun for many, many hours.


At the very beginning after starting campaign, we are welcomed by high-end, beautiful animations and voice acted scenario introducing us to the world, it's rules, mechanics and the goal of our planetary invasion. Player is thrown out of some rocket-ish vehicle onto the ground with few basic tools and that's where the story of deforestation, pollution and absolute environment annihilation begins. Yay!


As in most of those type of games, we assume some roof over the head would be nice so we start of with some simple base. Being slowly, step by step introduced to EVERY. SINGLE. LITTLE. mechanic - and I mean it, you'll feel like a toddler learning your first steps being dragged by your mother, grandma and three aunties - you will be learning that you need to get resources. And to get them, you need to get machines. And to get them, you need to get resources. So yes, you're getting this right - you are one guy on an epic quest to replace yourself with machines so you can build more machines. And believe me, it's FREAKING FUN!



Of course it will get more complex with your gameplay time, which of course depends only on you and your creativity along with your space management. As you can see on the screen above, I heavily lack one of those. Dozens of new machines will be thrown in your face after each "Milestone" you achieve, but you decide how quickly it will be done, so no worries, you wont get overwhelmed too easily, just keep your pace. It's your call if you wanna go for quality or quantity of machines and resources farming, if you wanna go wide or high with your machines, pretty or practical. It's all your choice and you can try every scenario if you only feel like it. And that's how you just got 30 hours in the game.


Once you will feel like stretching your legs a bit, you can always go for exploration. You get to choose which of 3 worlds (for now, probably more in the future) you want to spawn and each of those worlds have not only different rules to survive and build - there are many different biomes in there to explore and many creatures to meet (and electrocute them a bit, please don't call P.E.T.A.). On your exploring adventure you will probably trip on few "Work In Progress" items, so we know that developers have many plans for future updates. Finger crossed for the constant support.


Obviously it wouldn't be an Early Access title without some bugs on the way, but oh boy it's not even comparable with their previous games. Yes, you might encounter an occasional floating tree, classic fall-through-me rock or maybe even game crash, but I'm sure you will be too busy having fun despite this.


I'm not going to show every machine, creature and biome in here to save as much I can for you to buy and play it yourself for that special first time with it. And belive me or not, there's A LOT OF CONTENT that I'm missing on and even if you will get bored of going through it alone after 50 hours, you can add another 50 by going through everything with a friend, as there's a multiplayer mode implemented! There's nothing but hope and prayers that devs will continue to support this game as the possibilities for its expansion are absolutely huge and this might be on the top of the list of this year titles if handled with care and seriousness by them.


TL;DR : Surprisingly great Early Access building game with sweet mechanics and pretty graphics that can provide pure, constant fun and quickly develop into tough to cure addiction. And you can bring your friends along to this endless hell of satisfaction. Totally recommended to buy even at the current state.
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Comments
  • CJDance1
    May 11, 2019

    Great article! I've been playing this co-op and it really sucks you in... 8 hours goes by in what feels like 30 mins! 

    For me, the game would be perfect if there was a little more combat (like Factorio) where your base gets attacked and you have to setup defense perimeters. I understand that's not everyone's cup of tea, but personally I hope they add this as an option at some point. In the meantime, they've promised big updates at the end of every month so definitely one to keep going back to!

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