I really wanted to like this game. I obviously gave it a fair shot several times. I've made it to the final space elevator phase and my tolerance for this game is running thin.
I find "Satisfactory" to be one of the most frustrating gaming experiences available. I played through the entire game in co-op. Every single feature in the game had some point of friction whether intended by the developers or not.
Below are just some of the issues I ran into while playing.
* Belts that were working before now don't and need to be replaced. This can happen to any belts in the world whenever the game feels like it.
* Fluids just don't work at all.
* Rebinding controls only works for some controls and keybind combos.
* Pasting settings on a machine means I can't crouch anymore.
* Pumps cannot be upgraded in place.
* Sometimes my hoverpack just rises permanently and I need to quit to desktop to restore functionality.
* The fog and weather effects are so extreme I can't see the other end of my factories.
* I cannot use hypertube cannons as a client to the co-op server, all momentum is stopped in midair.
The most frustrating part of these issues is that the bug reports on their website are identified as "low priority" and many of them have been known for 5+ years without resolution to date. I do believe that these issues must be due to being in co-op as there's no way so many people could rate this game so highly with so many glaring issues. It's a shame that the developers don't care about the multiplayer experience.
Below are less objective, but still pain points for me.
* Movement is so frustrating, both the jetpack and endgame hoverpack provide no quick method of moving across the world, the best you get is unlocked from the start, slide jumping, but if you hit the tiniest uphill, all momentum is stopped.
* Enemies are a constant annoyance, you never really get a way to deal with them in any permanent way. You can kill them, but even after building over where they used to be, they just spawn back and attack you meaning you can never actually focus on the factory.
* The in-game tools for helping me plan a factory are completely useless. The ratios for products are so obscure and all future recipes and requirements are hidden. The map is static, never updating according to what the player does. I refuse to believe that anybody has beaten this game without pulling up an external mapping tool, external calculators, and the wiki to find future recipes.
* It's impossible to get any perspective of what the factory is doing until you get the hoverpack and even then I find myself re-checking every machine to see what recipe it has, how many items it makes per minute, and if it has what it needs.
* The visuals in this game are an absolute disaster. I thought the visuals were supposed to carry this game so I tried to get lost in them and just enjoy the scale and architecture of the factory. But I can't even do that because as soon as you build slightly outside of the expected style, you get extremely intense Z-fighting. Even just building a normal rail intersection is fraught with Z-fighting.
Overall, I've never been more disappointed by a game before. This game has so much potential and I've always wanted to experiment with 3D factory building, but unfortunately the developers are more focused on adding more features and making funny jokes about how their fluids are broken to bother actually improving quality of life.
