The Code Sewist

This is not going to be a full review of Factorio by any measure. I currently have about 30 hours in the game, and have only been playing for less than two weeks. And yes, as usual I'm late. I've been holding out buying Factorio because I had a suspicion it would take up a lot of my time if I bought it. I was right.

Turns out it's one of the most addicting games I've started in recent years, and I want to briefly give my impressions on the game as an old patient gamer and a guy experienced in developing software systems.

The Genre

It's a combination of different genres with a main focus on resource management and automation. It blends in various other genres like

• 2d top-down action when you are hunting or defending against biters.
• city-building when laying out your bases and factories.
• visual programming to program trains and automation logic.
• exploration when driving around looking for new minerals.

I'm sure more could be added to the list!

Factorio also reminds me of old games like The Settlers in how everything adds up to complex systems and supply chains, but unlike classic “god” games (Populous and Civilization being two other examples), in Factorio you control the game through an actual avatar (a human engineer) with its own health, equipment, and so on.

It also reminds me of Minecraft where some of the inspiration for the crafting and the logic network likely came from. In both games, you start with nothing, but Minecraft doesn't have an end goal or a clear path in the same way Factorio does. It's more of a true sandbox.

Factorio is a combination of many different genres into one, and yet it feels very coherent and polished. This is quite an accomplishment. There are already many copy cats out there, and many of them are great games in their own right. Factorio basically started a new genre it seems.

How Factorio Challenges the Player

One unique thing I discovered while playing was how much I enjoyed planning around upcoming challenges and discoveries. Everything in the game is based around resources, and producing them involves designing and building factories that makes them available. That process reminds me a lot of my actual day-to-day work as a software engineer. The challenges feels the same to me as when I plan out work on a new feature in a piece of software.

While most of the early game is more about designing than implementing—or rather, implementing is mostly just a matter of putting down structures on the ground—later parts of the game benefits greatly from designing some logic as well. You can probably finish the game with a minimal amount of logic, but certain tasks are definitely easier if you design automation with decision-making capabilities. At a minimum, automated trains does require you to specify stop and go conditions, and lay out routes.

Here's another example. I decided to make a train track system with several trains, but with mixed resources in the same cargo wagon. Thus I needed some way to decide what cargo to load on which train, and the amount to load. I could have solved it with different tracks and more than on wagon per train, but I naturally deviate towards the challenge of solving it with logic since I think it's a fun thing to do, and it let me avoid having redundant tracks and trains.

So while the game looks like a typically resource management game, it really does have a deep layer of logic and visual programming to it as well, and I'm not sure a lot of players are aware of that. A close friend of mine who plays Factorio as well, never made the connection until I told him my perspective.

Progression and Tutorials

One last point I want to touch upon is how the game teaches you to play. I really love that you are not forced through layers of tutorial text early on, but the game simply let's you explore on your own. That's a feature of old games that I really miss today. Tutorials are boring, and if the first few hours of a game is hand-holding and a lot of text explaining what should be obvious, your design is a failed one in my opinion. (Note to self: I should write a post about some of the worst examples in that regard.)

The fact that Factorio doesn't need any of that is itself quite an accomplishment and a sign of great design at work. Let me list a few ways the designers made the game more approachable than other complex game out there.

Limit the Scope Early On

At the beginning, you have very little. You can cut down trees and gather stone, and that's about it. Slowly you built more tools, more complex machines, unlock new technologies. But because of the pace of the game, it never becomes too much at once. And you have a lot of control on how fast you unlock things. If you like, you can spend time optimizing your factories instead of introducing new resources, if that's what you prefer.

Concise Tutorials and Hints

The tutorials are optional and hidden in a menu, but you do get notifications whenever a new hint or tutorial is unlocked.

They are all great.

They are short. Never more than a few lines of text, and they explain one thing, and they do it well.

Almost all of them have small neat animations that clearly illustrates the main point of the hint.

And some of them even have a small tutorial that lets you try out something very specific to get the feel for it.

None of them are like Wikipedia articles, and the game is better for it. If you really want it, there are plenty of wikis and videos that you can search out. But so far I haven't needed any of that to enjoy the game. Your mileage may vary.

Open-Ended Gameplay

This is both a very open-ended game and a very focused on, depending on your perspective.

It's very open-ended in that you can accomplish everything in many different ways. I friend of mine skipped trains completely because he found them too complicated. Turns out very long conveyor belts is also a viable strategy.

But the game is also very focused in that the tech tree is always the same, and there is only one official way to end a run. But you do get to skip certain parts of the tech tree if you just want to make a quick run. And you can always keep playing after the end.

Conclusion

Factorio is one of the best-designed and most enjoyable games I've played in the last five years at least.

Recently I've also been enjoying another resource-management game called Against the Storm (which I'll save for another blog post), and while I had a very good time with that game as well, it definitely has its flaws as well. I could point out at least a couple of things I would have designed differently.

Factorio, on the other hand, is something special. I can't think of anything important I would have changed. So much thought must have gone into the design and balancing of the systems in Factorio.

Now I'm just wondering how I will ever get back to the rest of my backlog of games to play. I'll write another review when I eventually have the game beat and all techs unlocked. Maybe that will give me a more nuanced view than I have now.