The big day has finally arrived as Factorio finally steps out of Early Access into the harsh reality that is the 1.0 final release after a whopping eight and a half years in development on the Steam platform.
The title offers a fascinating look at building a factory that eventually spirals out of control in terms of both complexity and size while the engineer (player) is attempting to bring their technology to the point that they can launch a rocket into the stars from the planet.
During the building and planning of the factory, players will begin to upset the local wildlife; bugs that will find themselves keen to reclaim the land that has been lost by your tendency to pollute as you have hundreds of factories pushing out that sweet billowing smoke into the atmosphere.
This turns the title as a whole into two parts; one where players are attempting to intelligently design entire segments of the factor to produce specific parts and pieces for later incorporation into other segments, and the other part where players are tasked with protecting what they’ve built from hostile wildlife.
The option to almost entirely automate your defenses using conveyor belts to keep turrets filled adds yet another layer to Factorio where almost everything can be entirely automated.
It’s a thrilling ride, through and through, of ingenuity and comprehensive planning with short punctuations of wanton murder of local national bugs and their hives as you wrap your increasingly large tendrils of human brilliance across a once untouched planet; this marriage of thought interspersed with occasional bits of action has resulted in Factorio being one of the most popular titles to work its way through the Early Access program on Steam.
Of a total of 65,959 reviews currently on Steam for Factorio, 98% of them are positive; an admittedly obscene ratio even compared with beloved classics such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2. Further, there is a free demo that you can download from Steam and dip your feet into the thought-process necessary to play well; if it isn’t your cup of tea, then no harm done aside from the sacrifice of your time.
The demo, it should be noted, does not come with the massive smorgasbord of mods that creative community members have been pushing out for years at this point, but mods can be a sore note: Wube Software, developers of Factorio, do not use the Steam Workshop; instead, they publish all mods on their own website which you can find at mods.factorio.com.
Some aren’t pleased that it isn’t all in a singular simple package on the Steam workshop, but including them into the base application is still relatively simple; you will be hard-pressed to find mods that will take up your evening to get working as planned.
It can be a bittersweet moment when a title finally gets its release, as it means that users shouldn’t typically expect a radical amount of content regularly added, but Wube Software has stated that they have every intention of continuing to support and work on the title. Add with this that they’ve stated multiple times that they won’t be participating in any sales, and you can pick this title up at your convenience. Just expect for morning to come far sooner than ideal.