Satisfactory Review
Satisfactory is a thrilling factory builder with endless automation fun, exploration, and some minor technical issues. A must-play for fans!
Writing a review for Satisfactory has been tricky, not because I don’t know what to say, but because every time I open the game to check something, I end up playing for hours without realizing it. That’s the magic of this factory simulator—it’s so addictive and engaging. Whether I’m solving problems on the factory floor or running away from alien creatures, every moment in the game is fun and rewarding.
Satisfactory combines the creativity of Minecraft with the strategic planning of Factorio, making it one of the best games I’ve played. After spending over 130 hours building and optimizing factories, the sense of accomplishment I felt after overcoming a tough challenge was unmatched. Even if you’re unsure about complex builder games, Satisfactory stands out from the rest.
In the game, you and your friends are dropped on an alien planet to build a base, gather resources, and produce materials to send into space for your employer, FICSIT Inc. As you progress, you go from simple tasks like gathering leaves and mining iron to building huge factories, using advanced technologies and solving complex puzzles. Though the story is light, gameplay is full of challenges that keep you hooked.
If you’re wondering how optimizing an assembly line could be fun, I get it—it sounds strange. But just like No Man’s Sky offers freedom with exciting goals to chase, Satisfactory keeps giving you new reasons to play. I’ve lost count of how many times I told myself I’d log off after fixing one more thing, only to spend hours more tinkering with my factory.
Each time you figure something out like how oil refineries work to produce plastic, it naturally leads to the next challenge—maybe crafting a rifle and making ammo from the refinery byproducts. Before you know it, you’re hearing birds chirping outside and realizing you’ve played all night!
Satisfactory Excels at Guiding You Through Small, Manageable Steps
Managing increasingly complex factories in Satisfactory can feel overwhelming, but the game does a fantastic job of guiding you step by step with its project checklist. Before you know it, you and your friends are handling massive operations that would have seemed impossible at the start.
My first factory was a small setup in the wilderness but it quickly turned into a chaotic web of conveyor belts which I humorously named Spaghettysburg. It wasn’t most efficient but it got job done and I proudly watched as we launched our hard-earned materials into space, despite messy layout.
As we progressed, our factories became more organized, like our coastal oil refinery, Gas Town, or the railway system we built in the air to keep things tidy. Fun comes from watching your little society grow while tackling harder engineering challenges like expanding your power grid to support new facilities or figuring out most efficient way to smelt ore. You don’t need to be a math expert or dive into wikis—just seeing unused materials piling up on a conveyor belt sparks the urge to fix things and keep everything running smoothly.
The Fun Is in Watching Your Society Grow as You Tackle Tougher Engineering Challenges
As you need to create dozens of components and manage many complex processes to complete Satisfactory’s Milestone deliveries, you’re constantly jumping between tasks, solving problems, and using new technology to make things easier. For example: at first, I used long conveyor belts to move resources across the map, but after unlocking better options, I automated transportation with trucks, trains, and even drones. This made everything faster, cleaner and much less chaotic. Evolving from a conveyor belt-reliant beginner to a jetpacking, gun-toting pro is incredibly satisfying and makes all the challenges worth it.
When you’re not busy managing your factory, you can explore a vast open world, fight creatures, avoid toxic gas and radiation, find hidden treasures and even befriend odd-looking lizard dogs to be your loyal pets. Instead of using randomly generated areas, Satisfactory has one large, hand-crafted map filled with unique regions, each with valuable resources to collect. You can access more places as you obtain more gear such as utilizing a gas mask to explore hazardous locations, a jetpack to scale steep cliffs or explosives to remove blocked passages. By enabling you to acquire better resources for your factory and opening you new locations to explore, these upgrades create an enjoyable cycle of constructing and exploration.
Of course, being on an alien planet means dealing with hostile creatures that want you dead—like boar-like animals that charge at you or glowing plants that spit out fireflies. You’ll unlock melee weapons and some basic guns, but combat isn’t Satisfactory’s main focus, and it shows. After a few hours, I had experienced all that combat had to offer. While it’s not terrible, it’s pretty forgettable compared to the game’s excellent building and exploration. The alien wildlife adds some danger when you’re out collecting resources, but it’s disappointing that there are only four types of creatures with a few variations.
While playing Satisfactory by yourself is enjoyable, playing it with others raises the stakes considerably. You may construct more quickly, exchange ideas, and explore new regions with pals while still pursuing shared objectives. One neat aspect is that you can use the Dimensional Depot to distribute supplies remotely if you’ve unlocked alien technology. This allows players to help each other even when they’re far apart, adding a fun dynamic to teamwork.
If Satisfactory has one issue, it’s that the game’s big ambitions can lead to performance problems. My team experienced frequent crashes, especially in multiplayer, and as our factories grew, we noticed texture glitches, frame drops, and pop-in issues. I tested the game on three PCs, and by the end, only my high-end system (Ryzen 9/RTX 4090) could handle it smoothly. You’ll need a pretty powerful PC to run the game consistently, but even with these issues, they were more of an annoyance than something that made us want to stop playing.
Conclusion
Satisfactory is hands down the best automation game I’ve ever played, and I can’t recommend it enough. Every one of the 130+ hours I spent building chaotic conveyor belts and perfectly efficient factories was fun, ridiculous, and even better with friends. Exploring the beautiful world for resources and hidden secrets adds a nice break from building assembly lines, even though the combat is pretty basic with only a few types of aliens. It’s a bit frustrating that the game’s high demands on your system can cause technical issues, but they don’t take away from how great this factory builder is.
