Satisfactory review

There is something about Satisfactory I genuinely respect. Despite being in early access for five years, booting up the 1.0 “release” version, there are still tutorials that will walk you through the early stages of the game. You will learn how to mine ore to begin your journey, and developer Coffee Stain Studios will hold your hand so that even if it’s your first factory or automation game, you won’t feel stupid, left out, or confused.

But that’s what the leader of the pack does, isn’t it? Where many have come since, and done well, Satisfactory is The One, for me. Now to set my stall out early, I won’t claim to be an all-knowing expert. I won’t even claim I played every update as and when it dropped. I have spent countless hours (I refuse to check) optimising, delivering, playing co-op with my conveyer expert bestie, and have stayed up past bedtime to just push one more objective home. Oh, and I own a Ficsit mug. Perhaps if you’re glued to the reddit, and have played more than me, this review won’t be for you, but I do want to ensure that with the full release, the game gets its due, so here we are.

Satisfactory won’t be for everyone. There, I said it. A blend of automation, management, with light combat elements, and a story that’s pretty much new to the 1.0 release, this is a game that has undergone some huge changes, even including a switch of game engine from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5. But if you’re new to the game, you’re getting a stable, beautiful world to explore, and enough tools and ideas to put even the strongest of PCs under strain.

You’ll start out descending onto a planet (there is more than one location, but I’d recommend you pick the starter), and you will quickly demolish your landing craft in order to build a habitation area. You’ll progress at speed from hacking away at ore locations and nabbing every loose piece of fauna you can, to building full-scale factories. Jobs that seem hard at first, like creating screws (the stories we could tell), will eventually be automated to the point where everything you did at the start is now just “happening”. The magic of that, however, is that not only did you do it, but you learned it, and you applied the knowledge gained to make it happen.

The beauty of Satisfactory lies in how varied it can become. The addition of co-op means you can leave your conveyer-expert-bestie with his spreadsheets and notebook, where he’s working out the optimum numbers and power required to make the factory run at peak efficiency. You can leave him, and you can disappear into the distance with some berries to heal you, a chunky sword-like weapon to beat away the nightmare-fuel spider-like creatures, all while you search for power slugs. It sounds like a fever dream, but that’s a way to contribute to the overall base.

Finding power slugs will advance research, but really, anything you choose to do is worthwhile if you consider it so. Discovering caves with resources; testing out new gear; connecting a secondary (or tertiary as things progress) base to the original base: these are all things that matter. Or you can simply create a Futurama-like tube that can fling you into the distance for a laugh. The word sandbox is thrown around at will with games these days, but Satisfactory is a genuine idealistic sandbox: it matters if you think it matters.

It’s also a wonderfully pliable game. Modern pretenders, for example, Foundry work with a voxel-based aesthetic that snaps to grids, but Satisfactory doesn’t mind if you want to have your conveyors clipping through one another. It’ll warn you nowadays that you’ll get clipping thanks to a handy orange coloured ghost-version, but it doesn’t stop you, or in any way slow your progress.

There is an end-game, of course. There’s a space elevator you’ll eventually build that requires enormous amounts of resources to be dumped into it to progress up the tier levels. Tier 9 will give you portals that allow you instantly teleport across the map. All major components have different levels, and a conveyer mark 6 is the fastest way to move items on a belt in the game; and is also new to the 1.0 update. Items like strange alien matter, mercer spheres, and somersloops can now finally have meaning, though I’ll leave you to discover exactly what they do, whether you’re a newcomer or returning fan. New buildings, parts, resources, and a lot more all mean that if you have been playing for five years, you’ve a lot to get going with as well.

But the majesty of Satisfactory is that you can do whatever you feel like doing on any given day. While it’ll suck you in and make you forget to get a drink, or miss half a day, your time will always feel well spent. You can go off hunting hostile creatures like hogs and spitters, testing out your new Rebar Gun only to find you just simply prefer slapping things with the Xeno-basher. If you fancy, you can build a train track around the land. Or you could aim to build a truck to just mint around the world in, though remember to make sure you have enough fuel.

You could create a massive explosion because it’s cool; you could optimise your power settings, or you could turn your factories into works of art, Minecraft-style; and if you want you can even turn the spitters into cats using arachnophobia mode. Coffee Stain Studios has created a game that was a masterpiece a few years ago, and only made it better over the years. Everything here is intuitive, and the first-person controls feel great. That said, don’t expect to be using a controller for this one, because while it starts out simple enough, you’ll soon become a multitasker and hot-bar expert.

Satisfactory might not be for everyone, but it definitely is designed for anyone. It’s a game with a sense of humour and is playful, yet also can have you feverishly scribbling notes that a mathematician would admire because you cannot sleep until you know why your heavy modular frame factory is not working at peak efficiency. Some may find the early game a little slow going, but every time I start a new world I just find myself enraptured once again. If you’ve been wondering what all the fuss is about these years, now is the time to scratch that itch, but be warned that once you’re in, you might never be able to stop: it’s just that good.