I have a lot of complaints about Satisfactory, but I want to start by saying I think it's a good game which totally rewarded the time and money I invested in it. I came to this as a casual Factorio fan, but this game has one big thing that Factorio doesn't: the feeling of standing on a cliff and looking out over an alien landscape that's been transformed by your work, your factory sprawling so far into the distance you can hardly believe you built it all bit by bit. I love that, and I've never had another experience quite like it in a game. With that said, on to my complaints, which I'm writing here mostly as feedback to the developers:
1. The game has two basic loops. The first loop involves building factories to manufacture product to develop technology to build more factories. That one's great. The second loop involves exploring the environment, getting killed, and then trying to get back to where you died so you can recover your belongings. That one's terrible. I understand why the world needs to have perils: it adds some risk-reward to exploration and expansion. But it's implemented so frustratingly here. For instance, there are moments where the game verges on a first-person shooter. Look, I like first-person shooters, and I'm reasonably good at them. But it isn't where these developers' strengths lie. The combat is awkward and tedious at every stage of the game. And that's when you even get a look at your enemy: half your deaths will be from some kind of gas, projectile, or flying creature that hit you from offscreen. Often you'll realise afterwards you were carrying all of your ammo, jetpack fuel etc. – before you comment, yes, I know it's wiser to leave some reserves at your base, but people don't always play these games optimally – meaning that getting back out there the second time is even harder than it was the first time. It's a shame, because the developers have built this beautiful world, but I found exploring it to be mostly a chore.
2. Progression could be a lot more exciting, and the ending in particular feels deeply anticlimactic. Sure, Factorio doesn't pat you on the back much. Even launching the rocket is just a brief animation that looks like it could be from 1994. But Satisfactory sells itself much more on spectacle – we're in 3D, the only limits here are imagination! – so the lack of it at these moments is more glaring. After hours and hours and hours of labour, you finish a stage of the space elevator, and as a player it feels like an accomplishment; but the game does very little to make it feel like an event. Plus, although it opens up new milestones, it doesn't itself offer any rewards. Why not give us some new powers, even if minor? Why not give us some visual upgrades to the hub? Anything at all???
3. It's unbelievable to me that the game came out in early access seven years ago and after all this time it's still so lacking in usability. If I built a conveyor lift to the wrong height, why is it so many clicks to correct the mistake? Why does troubleshooting problems with your train network first involve "catching" a train before it goes into a station – because, while it's loading or unloading, the game won't let you see anything – hurriedly going into a menu to stop the train, then laboriously inspecting every container? (You can't even rename a train remotely, let alone change its schedule or see what it's carrying.) Why is the fluid system regarded like voodoo by even the most experienced players, when this was never a problem in Factorio?
4. My final point relates to the last one. After you've finished the campaign, you're likely to spend less and less of your time solving problems, and more and more time designing buildings. When a player has thousands of hours in Satisfactory, it's usually because they're playing it as an architecture simulator. The developers must be well aware of this, so it's crazy to me how much that category of player is forced to work *around* the game, instead of working *with* it. Even something as basic as designing a curved road, or a conveyor that goes straight up a ramp, is something you have to watch YouTube tutorials to learn how to do. There are so many simple features that could have been implemented that, across the entire Satisfactory player base, would have saved the equivalent of thousands of lifetimes of fiddling around. (Mods can solve some of them, but not all.) This is a game that's sold nine million copies, where the equivalent of Architectural Digest tours get hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube – and we're still stuck with three types of wall. It feels wilfully stubborn at this point.
