This time in my personal series called 'games nobody likes, but me':
FACTORIO (or why men like model trains)
Imagine a top-down Minecraft without the bullshit. You are stranded (...deep, hehe. that is another review) on a strange planet, inhabited by strange bug-like aliens. Just you, some sparse resources and the goal to make it off of this god forsaken planet. How do you do that? Well, there is the Minecraft component (If you are like me and you are not that big of a Minecraft fan, don't give up just yet) I mentioned earlier. You have a pick axe and need to manually gather resources. Don't worry this is only the first about half hour. After that your goal is to automate EVERYTHING!
When you start a new game you can set various perimeters, like richness of resources or frequency of enemies, as you like. You will then be thrown into a proceduraly generated world and need to do research to make new technology available to then make your life easier with the ultimate research being rocket defense, which is the endgame for the moment.
This game is all about production chains and automation. You have some basic ressources: coal, iron, copper, stone and oil (water and wood only to an extend). Everything else is made from these resources, be it tanks, circuits, inserters, assembly buildings or whatever. So you start by mining iron and coal which you can make into iron plates inside of a furnace. An inserter takes the iron plates out of the furnace, puts them onto a belt which transports said plates to an assembly station that makes iron plates into iron gear wheels, which get transported to another assembler that makes electric miners out of them together with some other resources.
The alien life gets more and more pissed with you and your demolition of their natural habitat. So they need to go, which is easier said than done. Depending on your game settings the aliens can be very challenging and to be able to get to the higher tier research and products you will need to fight them.
It's not easy to explain, but soon enough you find yourself min-max-ing the shit out of your little factory. There is always a way to make something more efficient and higher tier products need a lot of different ressources that you sometimes have to transport them from very far away. Sometimes so far away that you will have trains running across your map, bringing raw goods to your factory.
This game is in alpha, but for 10 bucks you get a game that runs very stable and offers HOURS of content. I have sunk about 100 hours into it and still want to restart on a new map every day to try out my new idea to make my factory even more efficient. There is also a new multiplayer part were you can build together with a friend. I haven't played it so far, but it seems to run stable enough.
Take a look around www.factorio.com / www.reddit.com/r/factorio
Cheers
TypeO
FACTORIO (or why men like model trains)
Imagine a top-down Minecraft without the bullshit. You are stranded (...deep, hehe. that is another review) on a strange planet, inhabited by strange bug-like aliens. Just you, some sparse resources and the goal to make it off of this god forsaken planet. How do you do that? Well, there is the Minecraft component (If you are like me and you are not that big of a Minecraft fan, don't give up just yet) I mentioned earlier. You have a pick axe and need to manually gather resources. Don't worry this is only the first about half hour. After that your goal is to automate EVERYTHING!
When you start a new game you can set various perimeters, like richness of resources or frequency of enemies, as you like. You will then be thrown into a proceduraly generated world and need to do research to make new technology available to then make your life easier with the ultimate research being rocket defense, which is the endgame for the moment.
This game is all about production chains and automation. You have some basic ressources: coal, iron, copper, stone and oil (water and wood only to an extend). Everything else is made from these resources, be it tanks, circuits, inserters, assembly buildings or whatever. So you start by mining iron and coal which you can make into iron plates inside of a furnace. An inserter takes the iron plates out of the furnace, puts them onto a belt which transports said plates to an assembly station that makes iron plates into iron gear wheels, which get transported to another assembler that makes electric miners out of them together with some other resources.
The alien life gets more and more pissed with you and your demolition of their natural habitat. So they need to go, which is easier said than done. Depending on your game settings the aliens can be very challenging and to be able to get to the higher tier research and products you will need to fight them.
It's not easy to explain, but soon enough you find yourself min-max-ing the shit out of your little factory. There is always a way to make something more efficient and higher tier products need a lot of different ressources that you sometimes have to transport them from very far away. Sometimes so far away that you will have trains running across your map, bringing raw goods to your factory.
This game is in alpha, but for 10 bucks you get a game that runs very stable and offers HOURS of content. I have sunk about 100 hours into it and still want to restart on a new map every day to try out my new idea to make my factory even more efficient. There is also a new multiplayer part were you can build together with a friend. I haven't played it so far, but it seems to run stable enough.
Take a look around www.factorio.com / www.reddit.com/r/factorio
Cheers
TypeO
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