Someone at work asked me what Factorio was about once, and I said something like ‘it’s this game where you’re a space engineer who crash lands on an alien planet. There’s not much there except raw resources that are randomly placed, and you build a factory to collect those resources and turn them into other things, to eventually make a rocket and get off the planet. It’s quite chill though, you build stuff and then you can just watch it go, and you can design the whole thing the way you want.

And he said ‘oh so it’s a bit like Animal Crossing then?’

And I instantly wanted to say no because, of course they’re totally different games but actually when I paused for a second, it isn’t a bad comparison in some ways.

To be clear, whether you like Animal Crossing or not will have absolutely no bearing on whether you like Factorio or not. They are two totally different games. Factorio is a fairly drab-looking, top-down 2D game that will stretch your brain while you try to figure out how you’re going to get your coal over to where your oil is being extracted, because you’ve just discovered how to make plastic, which you want to be able to make robots, but all of your iron is being used up making steel elsewhere. Or something like that, there’s always something you will have in mind to make one part of your base more efficient or just generally bigger and better, and once you’ve got that done you’ll set your sights on another part. It’s easy to build and to remove items, so you’re never stressing about making mistakes when you’re building. The feeling of seeing your factory (and yourself as you use your factory to make armour) get better over time is really satisfying. Heck even just watching it do its thing for a little while is quite hypnotic at times too.

As you build your base it generates pollution, and this affects the alien bug creatures (called Biters) that also live on the planet. These Biters will attack you and your base as you try expand into their territory, and so you might also need to factor in the need for walls and gates, and gun turrets and flamethrowers to defend yourself until you’re ready to go out and take out their nests. To be honest, thing aspect of the game isn’t really for me, as I don’t like the idea of having to drop what I’m doing to deal with Biters, or having that bit of time pressure to get things done before you make too much pollution and they start attacking. There are a ton of settings you can modify before you create your world though and turning off the Biters is one of the settings, and I like that there’s a lot of customisation here so that you can play at your own pace in whichever way suits you.

So yeah, it’s Animal Crossing I suppose, except instead of building a museum and a coffee shop you’re building a dirty great factory, and your neighbours aren’t quite so friendly. You’ve got time to slowly and steadily turn the land into something of your own design, which you’ll end up being pretty proud of.

I won’t lie though, it took me about 7 tries to get into Factorio after I first bought it. There seems to be a lot of keys to remember, but it’s actually very well thought out and once you get the hang of it you really minimise the amount of time you spend in menus and in your inventory and things because there’s hotkeys for everything. Until you get to that stage, it feels a bit like you’re learning Excel hotkeys or something. But it’s worth sticking with.

The other thing that put me off was the general look of the game, until I read a post on Reddit that got me thinking about it completely differently. At the very beginning you land on this not-quite uninhabited land, full of trees and rocks and lakes. You get to work building your factory, which is all noise and smoke and dirty rusty metal. You create pollution which over time kills the trees, turning them from colourful and leafy into dead sticks. The grass turns brown and so does the water. You’ll probably start paving the place so that you can move around faster, and that will add a little splash of grey to the brown landscape. I thought it all looked a little bit drab to be honest and I wasn’t keen. But here’s the thing: you’re the bad guy here. You have turned up on this unspoilt planet where the Biters are really just chilling out and living their lives. And you start wrecking the place, mining out all of the resources, belching out a ton of smoke from your power plants and assembly machines, and just generally make a mess of the place. The biters quite rightly want to protect their homes and so they come for you and the machinery that’s making such a mess. Eventually you escape the planet, hooray for you, but you destroyed the place, turned it into desolate wasteland with just your dirty rusty factory to see. I still don’t think it’s a pretty game but with that bit of understanding I really appreciate how the look of the game conveys that selfishness of what shaping things the way you want does to the land.

One other thing that I really like about Factorio is the way the game itself changes over time. At the start it’s all about having your guy run back and forth keeping things topped up with resources. Soon enough, you’ll have conveyor belts that help to automate that. Then you’ll want to build some extra bits and you’ll have the puzzle of how you’re going to lay the conveyor belts out so that everything gets what it needs. Once you’ve figured that out, you migth notice that some of your ore patches are nearly depleted, so you’re going to have to start mining ore from further afield. So you’re going to want to build a railway system to be able to shuttle materials back to your main base. Enjoy figuring out how to automate those trains! Soon after this, you’ll realise that things are getting a bit too big to build yourself, so you’ll want a robot network to come and help you out. Enjoy learning how that works, and have fun setting it up so that you can just stamp down a blueprint and watch the little guys go! It’s great, the interface barely changes throughout the whole game but the way you play the itself game itself evolves as your factory gets bigger and bigger. I really like the way this is done.

There’s an expansion coming out for Factorio in 2024 and it looks like it’s going to be great, adding in more planets and loads more things to research and build. I’m really looking forward to it. I wonder if it will be released on the Switch too?

Here’s my one and only screenshot from my 200 hours worth of playing: the one save that I actually managed to launch a rocket on:

Factorio 'win' screen, showing my time played as 29 hours and 14 minutes, and stats stating that I 'killed' 2 trees and a small electric pole during the course of my playthrough