I found myself itching for a game in the Factory genre and first picked up Satisfactory, a brilliant, fun, beautiful factory game. I had a blast with it… but I heard some chatter that maybe Factorio was even better… so I checked it out.
The control scheme for this game is absolutely TERRIBLE. The interface is TERRIBLE. The initial onboarding tutorials are NON-EXISTENT and the game is so poorly balanced that it demands that you solve complex puzzles right out of the gate before you even know the controls.
It took me 30-minutes to figure out how to cut down trees to fuel my initial burner. I discovered the “C” key… which apparently shot the trees down with a gun… but delivered no wood into my inventory. It took me an hour to figure out how to cancel placement of buildings, rotate buildings, and get my resources onto a belt. I only learned how to cancel the building attached to my cursor after digging through the key bindings and discovering that it is mapped to MOUSE BUTTON 5(!) and Q (you’d think… ESC… amiright?). Rotate is accomplished with “R” or “Shift+R” for counter clockwise… you’d think mousewheel right? Mousewheel controls Zoom which is kinda not all that important initially… especially considering it’s also mapped to Shift+mousewheel. The basic lack of care put into the onboarding of new players is the most frustrating and lacking I’ve seen since maybe the days of loading games written in BASIC from Cassette onto my old TRS-80… even worse than the notoriously lacking tutorials of Starseige Tribes around 20-years ago.
Most factory games would have machines with parts coming out on belts (and there’s some of that initially) but this game goes right to “pickers” out of the gate… especially confusing because I couldn’t figure out how to rotate anything… combined with confusing two-lane belts that as of this writing still do not make any sense to me … I’m honestly not sure if the belts having two lanes is even meaningful yet and I’ve spent (wasted) 5 hours of my life on this game already.
On top of that, the game has a flawed god-mode perspective because you can’t build anything or destroy anything unless your player character is nearby controlled with the WASD keys (all combat and player controls are basically left-handed facepalm). And if you’re not close enough it just makes a dumb noise at you.
My game started with my ship crashed next to a copper mine, but my intuition told me that copper wasn’t the actual starting point, so I found some iron, then some coal, then copper and then once I got to water/steam… I decided I’d had enough. My inventory boxes were filling up with parts… the drag-and-drop controls were already feeling burdensome and repetitive… there’s no “take all” button from storage containers… and I just got to the point where it all felt like manual labor. This game needs an overhaul starting with the first rule of game design: “simple input, complex output”… I am too busy to deal with this game. I gave you my money… you’re welcome…. seems like it could be a good game… but not something I would enjoy in it’s current state.