FOUNDRY

Reviewing after just over 7 hours of playing, because I can't motivate myself to keep playing. This game has HUGE potential, and already has many fantastic gameplay elements. I absolutely love the voxel-based world and build system, the world looks great and the logistics work smoothly. Controls are a bit janky and the keymap is pretty big, but controls were intuitive and customizable enough to get them under control quite quick. However, it has failed to grasp me with the addicting gameplay loop I know from other factory games. While in Satisfactory, at any time there is 10 different factories I want to build, in this game I found myself just waiting for research to finally complete with 0 motivation to build anything else. I have like 500 hours in Satisfactory, and for good reason. There is very little incentive to actually build factories for more than a few parts. I am almost 8 hours in, and so far the only things I have actually produced in factories are science packs (I and II) to unlock more research, as well as robots to sell for Firmarlite (money). Other than that, all buildables can be easily hand-crafted just from the smelting products, so there's no point in automating any of it. I also built a steel factory, not because I have anything I actually need steel for, but because I was bored and didn't know what else to build. Now I've unlocked steam power, which feels useless as the previous tier of energy was still more than enough. Now I'm just sitting around waiting for research to complete and money to build up, so the only thing I can do to advance in the game, is to just build more of the factory I already built. (And what I have so far is far from small) I also wish exploration played more of a role. So far the only reason to move around is to find more resources. Again this game has massive potential and in many ways it's already awesome. It's still in Early Access and I hope the progression will be overhauled before the full release, at which point I'll probably try it again. At the current price point I can't recommend the game, but a big thanks to the devs for their hard work anyway.

6/10 rating I'm about 47 hours in and not sure if I will go on. I will recommend the game, but I grew bored and didn't get to end-game. I loved Satisfactory, and thought they were similar, but for good or bad, they are different in many/enough ways. The good: Smooth gameplay. I didn't see any bugs. The Jetpack helps so much. The Space station was an interesting twist. The not so good: Its not always apparent what to work on next. The tech tree is quite messy. Dependencies are not obvious without drill down steps. Minerals not based on real names. I prefer names like Copper, Iron, Gold, Platinum.. Made up names are hard to commit to memory. Unable to see what is being produced in Assmeblers at a distant glance. You have to get right up to the console and then magnify it to see. Hard to see Input/Output amounts. This makes it hard to see how many X machines are needed to supply/balance a belt or another machine. Laying conveyors/pipes and manipulation of elevations is tedious. The miner ship (boring machine) was rather limited in use. Just easier to do without it. I did not feel encouraged to build UP.. I was spread out across the areas. Clearing out a nice level area was a bit annoying. The thousands of small blocks it takes and the elevations and clutter caused some slight grief. Nothing major. But in Satisfactory for example, I would elevate just above the terrain and lay a foundation. This was not quite so easy. This is a good game with more potential. I just did not click with it as much as I expected.

If you are coming from Factorio, Satisfactory, or early Minecraft, be warned: Foundry has a solid technical foundation but lacks the soul and quality-of-life tools that make automation games fun. Scaling is brutally tedious. By the Red Science pack, you are manually hand-placing hundreds of machines and 3D belts. Expanding feels like data entry rather than a creative puzzle. The world also feels completely superficial. You are essentially playing in god mode with no hazards or fall damage, removing any satisfying survival stakes. The game really needs a few major overhauls: 1. Official Blueprints: A native copy-paste system is mandatory for mid-to-late game scaling. 2. Grit and Charm: The world feels overly sanitary, like a fake theme park ride with narratives written by corporate HR. It needs real character. 3. Actual Hazards: Meaningful environmental dangers to give base-building a real sense of purpose. 4. Proper Mining: Replace early-game node spheres with massive, depleting veins. Dropping a single drone miner that lasts half the game entirely defeats the purpose of a voxel mining game.

My CV: 1k+ hours in Factorio, and loads in DSP and Satisfactory. Finally got around to playing Foundry. Quick rundown: - If you loved Factorio but found Satisfactory to be too focused on pretty design/hunting, then Foundry is a great game for you. - If you loved Satisfactory, but found Factorio to be too focused on adding more and more machines to a production setup, then Foundry is not a great game for you. Foundry has great bones. The mining setup is fun (don't sweat the fact that resources aren't infinite). Power management is mostly a breeze, and fluids are largely intelligible. Technologies progress smoothly, and the economic side of the game viz your space station is good fun, and impacts your factory management (say, deciding to use a greater % of your total factory production to boost near-term profits so that you can buy more ships so you can sell more so you can so you can ...). Foundry does have a few flaws. It needs trains (coming). It needs galactic economic balancing. It needs a way for me to see how my factory compares to other player setups over a set amount of time (who is profiting the most, the fastest?). It could use more light varieties. You get the idea. But as a factory game player and one who was new to the voxel world, Foundry has proved to be good fun. Give it a try. p.s. the Foundry jetpack is good.

Put simply, this game is amazing! The game runs very well even with truly MASSIVE builds. When I first got Foundry I didn't expect it to be as well optimized as it is, yet here I am, several hundred hours into a single save and the game is still running as smooth as butter!

Alright so, why does Foundry not grab me? I'm going to be comparing it with Dyson Sphere, Factorio, Satisfactory, all of which I've recently played co-op with David: 1. Looks. It looks the worst, view distance is very short, and never do I think "wow it looks great" 2. Exploration doesn't really exist, in all 3 of those other games, there is something unique(ish) to explore, and reasons to explore, part of that is looks, part of that is unique items, satisfactory is the best here. 3. Lack of "cool" factor. The tech jump from manually placing tile in factory to bots, or the alien tech and how cool your factory looks as it explains, the lights and such, or flying to other planets and seeing your interstella factory humming along. None of that is there, Foundry just has more stuff for the sake of more stuff. Click menus and watch as options in your menu goes from grey to green, hurray! But what does it matter for my spaceship to have a lvl 3 hanger? Well now your ship menu says 3/4. It's all too abstract. Could just be a text based game 4. No combat, so there's no urgency or breaking up of boring tasks 5. It isn't scaling well. where are the blueprints? The actual building out of stuff I find tedious. You run very slowly, the movement isn't as fluid and fun as satisfactory. The idea of building a new something fills me with dread, "oh god, I can't be bothered". Maybe I need to use the drone more, maybe but the pay off isn't there. I'm going to get this product out of it... great, to do what? Where are the personal upgrades? I could build myself new runners to go fast, or fuel to fly faster, or new suit to have a bigger inventory. There's no personal incentive to unlock stuff that are cool. The movement is like minecraft, which is clunky and awkward. Satisfactory feels like apex legends 6. There's no end goal, and no meaningful thresholds or rewards to the player. Or if there is, they're hidden to me. WHY I can't spend money to buy upgrades for my character, or base, or anything is beyond me 7. The engagement with other systems and stars and civilisations is dull and un-interesting. Why even bother having the galaxy map different colours and ♥♥♥♥? Who cares. And wtf is going on story wise? You can chalk this up to EA, but who are we that we are just bought a planet? So I guess, I just don't feel rewarded for playing the game. Or the reward I am given isn't grabbing me, which is just more complexity for the sake of complexity. I'm not seeing cool new biomes, I'm not seeing stronger monsters, more combat, I'm not feeling stronger as a character, I'm not feeling like I'm discovering something, over coming anything, or learning something. I'm being given more busy work.

Pros: 1. The early game is fun. Cons: 1. Tedium. Things just get more and more complex and byzantine. 2. The "Skill Tree" is poorly organized and hard to read. Just when you think you are ready to unlock something, you discover that you ain't there yet. 3. Frustrating impediments to progress. Example: You must upgrade the space station, and this requires construction material (CM for short). There are 2 ways to get CM: Buy them on the market, but this requires that you own a spaceship, but you can't buy a spaceship because you need upgrades. Classic Catch-22. The alternative is lava-smelting your hard-earned money and using the result as one ingredient among several that are combined to make CM. Lava smelting requires many unlocks: Elevator, high voltage, mining drones and more. The lava cave is the basement of Hell itself, requiring deepest mining just to access it. All of this to satisfy basic game elements, which makes me wonder what the advanced game must be like. After 40 hours of play, the tedium got to me. The UI needs an overhaul, plus the play needs streamlining, and if they ever do that, I'll try again.

Neat game with active development. LLM generated voices are an unforced error. I understand that voice lines are being added, removed, and reworked with every update and it's not feasible to hire a voice actor in every update in every language to re-record everything. LLM generated voices sound great! While the development is in flux, just have computer generated voices take care of what we can't record and then everyone has at least *some* voice acting in the game Except.. the LLM generated voices sound bad and this game is not at all enhanced by having dialogue in the first place. This studio is now statistically less likely to hire real voice actors when the voice lines are less in flux. It seems trivial, but I don't support it. The voice lines in this game are so insignificant as a part of the experience that they could've been beeps and chirps a-la Animal Crossing or R2D2. No voice actor gets hired still, but at least this trend of machine generated voice acting is made less normal