Factorio
The absolute gold standard in factory games, standing out as the exemplar of smooth progression curves, options out the ears, gameplay that keeps the “one more turn” itch going and developers that care far beyond selling copies. To elevator pitch this one, “If you can do it, you can automate it.”
To describe Factorio by only using games that preceded it feels like an exercise in futility. The concept was born from Minecraft mods, but it feels unfair to compare the two or make the Terraria reference (this, but in 2D). So, taken on its own, Factorio is a game where you play an engineer who is trying to escape the situation they are in by building a rocket. But since the refining and assembling of material components for that sort of thing is unfeasible by yourself, you must build a factory to automate the process. Along the way you must research concepts and upgrades for the planet you are on, mine resources and deal with the locals (in the form of giant insects).
– Real player with 3172.1 hrs in game
I read a comment by a user saying “If you enjoy creating your own problems and solving them this is for you.” and he was bang on the money.
tl;dr
The knock-on effect caused by dependencies across an entire production chain will drive you nuts and it’s this that makes you play and I mean MAKES you play. Sleep is not an option.
Factorio
Engineers rejoice. Learn Technology, Automation and Efficiency in one easy to learn package. No? Seriously. this is a hard game to put down.
– Real player with 1654.2 hrs in game
Factory Town
TL;DR:
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A mix of elements from Anno, Factorio and Kingdoms and Castles
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It’s got that game loop in place: discover improve discover improve. There’s always that one new thing you want to build or line you want to change
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Very active dev, daily responses in Discord and weekly updates
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Already a large amount of content, even in its current state you’ll get your money’s worth in playtime
Disclaimer:
I’m one of the early beta testers, probably the 3rd or 4th wave. So I did get the game for free (although I’ve since abundantly made up for it with feedback & bug reporting etc). I’ve also been bumped up to mod on the Discord (come say hi!). So you know, this is a sliiightly biased review ;)
– Real player with 541.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Base Building Sandbox Games.
What is it?
A resource management game where you will find increasingly efficient ways to route goods from source to manufacture, and onwards to sell so that you can grow your town.
You’ll start with a few workers with which you’ll gather wood and stone. Then you’ll manufacture planks which in turn can make a wheel! Along comes a cart that can carry more than all those people. Meanwhile, new buildings will start to unlock, and new products can be manufactured which in turn can earn you coins of differing colours, with more advanced technologies needing the rarer coins to research and unlock.
– Real player with 498.3 hrs in game
Factory Magnate
Factory Magnate is part factory builder, part business tycoon. It puts you in the shoes of an industrious factory engineer with a small loan of a million credits. Your goal is to build an empire of factories spanning multiple planets in a procedurally generated solar system. You seek to dominate the solar system through sheer wealth and influence, not military might or political power.
AUTOMATION BY DEFAULT
You don’t control a character and you can place factory buildings anwyhere, as long as you have the money to do so. This takes the “early game” known from other similar games out of the equation, because you jump straight to automation and skip all the manual labor.
NO CRAFTING
It’s all about the money.. because in this game, money is your most important resource.
You don’t craft buildings, you buy them.
PROFIT IS EVERYTHING
You earn money selling your goods to the locals. They seem to have an endless supply of money to throw at you, but if you saturate the market, prices will drop - possibly making your factories operate at a loss. It’s up to you to strike a balance.
THE FACTORY NEVER SLEEPS
At the core of the game sits the main challenge: the factory is always running, and you must pay upkeep. If you’re not selling enough to make a profit, you’ll soon be out of business.
You. Must. Keep. Selling.
PoliPlanet
Your galaxy is a blank slate; An untamed wilderness full of potential! Travel from planet to planet and develop each one into a beautiful village, town, or city through the use of machines and crafting!
Physics-Based Interaction
Actions in PoliPlanet are generally completed by interacting with the physical world rather than through the use of menus and UI. Whether it’s gathering resources, loading machines, or planting trees, it’s all done in real time and space.
Free-Form Building
No grids, no point & click. Whether it’s a segment or a complete structure, you’re free to build wherever and however you want. Let your creativity flourish!
Real Relationships
Citizens in PoliPlanet are not mindless NPCs who follow a predetermined set of instructions. They build complex relationships with the player and each other. Treat them well!
Natural Progression
As you develop your skills, you’ll learn more about the resources at your disposal and gain the ability to craft bigger and better structures and machines. As your planets become more inviting, NPCs will begin take notice. If they like them enough, they might even fly over in their rocket ship and take up residence! But of course, everyone is different. A merchant might want to see a few other citizens living on your planet before they’re willing to set up shop. They need someone to sell to after all!
Elaborate Procedural Generation
Each planet is unique, with its own resources and features! So what if your citizens are requesting some plant life on your sandy, desert planet? Well, it’s off to your spaceship to search for a shiny new planet, lush with trees and plants! But how will you get them back to your civilization? Rockets? An overly complicated tube system? Build a transportation robot who exists solely to carry out your every request? It’s up to you!
Stack Gun Heroes
Stack Gun Heroes combines fast paced combat with addicting base building. Invent your own gun and take it on challenging missions to earn valuable resources. You process the loot back home in a factory of your own design.
Gun Building
The Stack Gun can be customized however you want. Will you make a gun that shoots sentry drones that chase and shoot enemies? A gun that abducts people into the upper stratosphere? Or maybe a gun that shoots yourself at the enemy, killing them with the impact damage.
These aren’t pre-made classes. Players invent their own strategies. Chances are you will come up with a playstyle the developer has never thought of.
Factories
Your base is a giant factory that you build with the Stack Gun. You will use it to process loot into items that make you more powerful. There are tons of base machines to build, you can unlock tech infinitely, and the factory has no maximum size.
Features
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Make any gun. Want a gun that cuts off limbs? A gun that shoots guns at people? A gun that makes you fly? Why not all 3 in one? Combine any gun parts for whatever effects you want.
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Get so much loot you need to design a factory to process it all. No boring menus, you interact with your machines by doing sick wall-jumps and wall-slides on them. Efficient production is radical!
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Try out BILLIONS of procedural superpowers. Can you find a use for that power that teleports all nearby bullets wherever you point?
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You can bring as many friends as you want into online co-op to beat very challenging maps, assuming you aren’t an incredible badass who has no friends.
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Infinite endgame lets you advance in power forever. Start with “normal” FPS guns and before long you’ll be accidentally killing yourself with nukes 10x the size of the map and running into walls at supersponic speeds.
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Test your most irritating guns on your friends in deathmatch. They can’t be mad. It’s for science!
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Run through enemies, wall-slide down skyscrapers, dismember robots, collect superpowers, launch people into space. Every time there was a cool idea, it went in the game.
After 9 years and over 16,000 hours working on this project it’s almost ready. Stack Gun Heroes is my dream game. Hopefully it’s yours too!
-Unstackd
Cyber Factories
Cyber Factories is an Automation and Base Building game in a cyberpunk universe.
On post-apocalyptic Earth, all cities and settlements have been ravaged by pollution, war and a hostile biosphere.
Humanity as a species hasn’t adapted well and only a small fraction of them remain. Fortunately, humans recently discovered a new technology allowing them to transcend death. This discovery consist of transferring human soul to a new synthetic cyber-body receptor. These new humanoid robots can now endure thousands of years of light speed travel!
With this new hope, you lead a colony of human remnants. Help them survive, expand and gather enough resources to leave Earth for their new home planet..
Satisfactory
In Vegas, there are people who remain mired in their own filth, rather than leave a slot machine they’re so sure is going to pay off any minute. I used to mock those people…then I bought Satisfactory and have become one of them. In fairness, Satisfactory actually does pay out, consistently.
I’ve never been so sucked into a game. When I first got it, I played through until just before nuclear tech, then managed to pause for a few weeks until Update 4 came out, then went nuts on it again. I thought it had run its course, and I could reintroduce myself to society…then Update 5 hit the experimental build.
– Real player with 495.8 hrs in game
I was pretty sure I’d spend 15-20 hours playing it. Which I did, right before update 5. 200+ hours later and I still can’t put it down. Every time I play the game I feel like I pick up a new way to do something and have to build yet another factory to test my theory.
At first I hated the xeno creatures that guard resources and drop pods, but now I actually kind of like that I can choose to go deal with them or not. Chasing down some xenos and hunting for pods or clearing resource nodes is a good break from building on occasion.
– Real player with 258.2 hrs in game
Time to Morp
Time To Morp is a game about weird and quirky creatures, building bases, exploring worlds, automation, research and much more. But most importantly - friendship!
Explore a vast world!
Search for new resources, discover different biomes and rare plants, climb mountains or delve into caves, search for secrets or just chill near a lake while some sneaky morp is trying to steal your sandwich…
Morp?!
Morps! A whole bunch of cute little creatures! Some are friendly, some are not, some bite, and some just run in circles and scream… But the most important part is - they MORPH!
Morph?!
Shapeshift, change, mutate, you name it! Feed it metal - crunch! - it’s producing metal now! Leave it near water - splash! - it’s your personal walking fountain! Mix and match to produce every resource you need!
Build a base!
Place fences, pipes, pumps, wires, decorations, lights, music and sit back in appreciation of a job well done and everyone living in peace and harmony… for five minutes tops.
Automate everything!
Use our patented Not-So-Complicated Pump Systems™ to easily automate everything from morp routes and food logistics to sleep schedules and power consumption. Set it up and watch everything go horribly wrong.
Fun Multiplayer!
Invite your friends to play, explore, build and collectively wonder who fed fruit to an electrical morp and now you don’t have enough electricity and oh my god why is that tree on fire
Research, expand, unlock!
Collect resources, receive gadgets, invent tools, craft vehicles, invest in technology. Spread out, travel, explore. And never complete the main story because you have this little thing you can optimize juuust a little bit more.
Dyson Sphere Program
Easily my game of the year. In my decades of gaming, never have I encountered a game this satisfying.
It’s basically Factorio in space, but there are 2 major differences: the end goal, and the visuals.
In Factorio, your goal is to launch a rocket.
In DSP, it’s to plan and build your very own fully customizable Dyson sphere.
Factorio’s moment-to-moment gameplay is a bit more engaging and interesting, but as soon as you put your first solar sail into orbit around your home star, you’ll know this game is something special.
– Real player with 649.4 hrs in game
Pros:
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Visually stunning
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Straightforward tech & production graph
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Planets
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Strip mining planets
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Good early to mid game performance
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Feels more accessible than Factorio or Satisfactory
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Modding (can help with the cons below)
Cons:
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Late game performance and file sizes can become horrible
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Tedious editing of the titular Dyson Sphere
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Boring and repetitive placing of mining equipment and factories late game
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Not much replay value beyond going for certain achievements
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Late game is practically waiting for hours for research/mining/achievement progress
– Real player with 577.4 hrs in game
Learning Factory
As a big fan of simulators (especially building-type simulators), I was excited to check this game out from the second it popped up on my gaming feed. It’s still in Early Access so it’s not quite complete, but you’ll still be able to put in quite some time to getting your factory up to tip top shape.
PROS:
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Nothing really costs too much money, so as long as you keep your researchers busy learning new things, you can make a large factory/shops with ease.
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Once you craft something, it’s yours forever. If you place it down, you can just pick it right back up.
– Real player with 20.9 hrs in game
Highly recommended, I bought it the moment the lovely Discord staff said it was up on Steam for sale.
Keeping in mind, this is an Early Access game, so some features will be inevitably changed, but so far, the game is so reminiscent of Factorio. Within the two hours of me playing this game, it had me do some quests that get you a little taste of the game.
Fair Warning, this game is buggy. It just got released a few hours ago. Have some faith you people.
I personally have beef with that delayed crafting bug.
– Real player with 10.2 hrs in game