I got to play a little Satisfactory this weekend. It's from the studio that made Sanctum and Goat Simulator and I think this was their last "Alpha Test Weekend". Primarily a single player game, it does support some multiplayer though from the sounds of it, it might be a bit janky. That being said, I kind of think this game would play best as a MP game. It's a factory building game with multi-biome exploration and it appears, some kind of actual End Game.
Given this is an Alpha and the 19th is their initial "Early Access" release on the Epic Games store (for $29.95 which seems a LITTLE steep for EA) I thought I'd give you the rundown.
1st: It looks fantastic. It's a first person game and you can clearly see this studio has done first person before. Only once did I have a visual issue and it was actually the fact that a mat drop looked unique and when I picked it up it turned into a different mat. Pretty sure it's just because that difference isn't in the game yet. It also runs pretty well. At 1080p I didn't notice any slowdowns (I did see that my factory animation are reduced at a distance so they look a little like slow frame rates when they start becoming visible, but my local area was smooth so I'm pretty sure that's an optimization not any kind of framerate isue). I don't remember exactly which video card I have since I built the machine a couple years ago but I'm running something like a Radeon 460 on an i5.
2nd: There is a tiered tech tree. This is fine except that there is some pretty significant bottlenecking in the early tree. I think the tree needs to be balanced better. You run into two related issues early on. 1 - You can't build conveyer splitters/mergers until fairly late in the early tech tree (you have to get past the first major hurdle) and 2 - you can't build more power plants until that major hurdle. This is an issue because you have to run multiple mines to feed multiple smelters and constructors and it is very easy to hit your power ceiling (it "trips the fuse" and stops running EVERYTHING when this happens). In reality, 1 mine can feed two smelters and in a some cases, 1 smelter can feed 2 constructors very easily. But you are forced to make multiples of everything. This wouldn't be a big issue but some of the early tiers require quite a few factory made resources which leads to you sitting at your workbench making them yourself when the goal is to get you to automate everything.
3rd: Lots of glitches, but mostly ones that make life easier. IE conveyer belts and power lines can clip through the ground with no ill effects. Laying conveyer belts is super easy and they will automatically turn etc. I am not yet good at making anything like a clean/square layout yet. But there is also a bug that currently breaks some functionality of my game. At one of the later tiers available in the test, you get the ability to scan local resources for "research". There is also wreckage scattered around the planet. Normally the wreckage is guarded by a very dangerous creature that I don't currently have the resources to defeat. I ended up finding one piece of wreckage where I came in the opposite side they expected and after building a workbench and some screws was able to open the drop pod. Inside was a hard drive which it said I should "place in my scanner to recover the contents". Hard drives appear to be a source of "alternate blueprints" or secondary ways to make tech. For instance, screws are normally made from metal rods and metal rods are made from metal ingots. Normal workflow is mine->smelter->constructor->constructor (or workbench). This alternate blueprint would require twice the ingots, but allow mine->smelter->constructor. However every time I try to choose my reward (out of 3 choices) the game crashed. I tried this 3-4 times last night before finally going to bed and it crashed every time. This makes my scanner unusable.
4th: There are some seriously annoying interface issues. When out exploring, you often want to change between eating berries and nuts to heal up and carrying your shock stick or object scanner. There are not configurable hotkeys or boxes on the screen to assign as a quick bar. This is made worse because both of these things exist. There are letter hot keys for construction, destruction, flashlight, ore scanner, mail and you can switch between any of those and your shock prod weapon. There are number hotkeys which seem to be automatically assigned as you begin to be able to build certain things. Right now I have power poles, power lines, conveyor pylons and conveyor belts. But I have to go into my inventory (which doesn't pause the game) and manually drag and drop the items into my "hand slot". This is made worse by the fact that it's pretty particular what counts as making it into the slot and what doesn't. There is no snap area around the slot that works, you have to be directly over it.
These issues are most glaring when exploring. Oh and there are hotkeys for stack splitting, transferring whole stacks etc, but they don't always display them depending on what storage you are interfacing with and they don't work for instance with switching what is in your hand.
Other issue is that feeding power plants is currently manual. You can build a constructor or two to take leaves/wood and turn them into biomass and then turn the biomass in to biogas and then manually feed that into your power plants at the early tier, but you have to manually collect leaves and wood first...fortunately biogas lasts pretty long.
But issues aside as I started getting more tech I got better and having the mats on hand for each level. In fact once I got over the first speed bumps of not enough power and not enough conveyor control, I found I was able to race through almost all of the remaining tech tree until I had to build the space elevator.
Oh and exploration and death. Death sees you respawn back in your hub with nothing and you will have a compass pointer to a chest containing all your stuff from your previous life. Hopefully you have enough in stores at your base to at least build a zapper and head out to get your items.
So my verdict is: I would buy it for $20 no problem. I think $29.95 is a little steep of an ask right now, but would absolutely pay that amount for version 1.0. Their roadmap says the first goals will be fixing crashes etc and minor quality of life changes. Then they plan to start ramping up some of the unexplored resource tech trees (I found sulfer, quartz, and bauxite while out exploring which it seems currently do nothing.
Given this is an Alpha and the 19th is their initial "Early Access" release on the Epic Games store (for $29.95 which seems a LITTLE steep for EA) I thought I'd give you the rundown.
1st: It looks fantastic. It's a first person game and you can clearly see this studio has done first person before. Only once did I have a visual issue and it was actually the fact that a mat drop looked unique and when I picked it up it turned into a different mat. Pretty sure it's just because that difference isn't in the game yet. It also runs pretty well. At 1080p I didn't notice any slowdowns (I did see that my factory animation are reduced at a distance so they look a little like slow frame rates when they start becoming visible, but my local area was smooth so I'm pretty sure that's an optimization not any kind of framerate isue). I don't remember exactly which video card I have since I built the machine a couple years ago but I'm running something like a Radeon 460 on an i5.
2nd: There is a tiered tech tree. This is fine except that there is some pretty significant bottlenecking in the early tree. I think the tree needs to be balanced better. You run into two related issues early on. 1 - You can't build conveyer splitters/mergers until fairly late in the early tech tree (you have to get past the first major hurdle) and 2 - you can't build more power plants until that major hurdle. This is an issue because you have to run multiple mines to feed multiple smelters and constructors and it is very easy to hit your power ceiling (it "trips the fuse" and stops running EVERYTHING when this happens). In reality, 1 mine can feed two smelters and in a some cases, 1 smelter can feed 2 constructors very easily. But you are forced to make multiples of everything. This wouldn't be a big issue but some of the early tiers require quite a few factory made resources which leads to you sitting at your workbench making them yourself when the goal is to get you to automate everything.
3rd: Lots of glitches, but mostly ones that make life easier. IE conveyer belts and power lines can clip through the ground with no ill effects. Laying conveyer belts is super easy and they will automatically turn etc. I am not yet good at making anything like a clean/square layout yet. But there is also a bug that currently breaks some functionality of my game. At one of the later tiers available in the test, you get the ability to scan local resources for "research". There is also wreckage scattered around the planet. Normally the wreckage is guarded by a very dangerous creature that I don't currently have the resources to defeat. I ended up finding one piece of wreckage where I came in the opposite side they expected and after building a workbench and some screws was able to open the drop pod. Inside was a hard drive which it said I should "place in my scanner to recover the contents". Hard drives appear to be a source of "alternate blueprints" or secondary ways to make tech. For instance, screws are normally made from metal rods and metal rods are made from metal ingots. Normal workflow is mine->smelter->constructor->constructor (or workbench). This alternate blueprint would require twice the ingots, but allow mine->smelter->constructor. However every time I try to choose my reward (out of 3 choices) the game crashed. I tried this 3-4 times last night before finally going to bed and it crashed every time. This makes my scanner unusable.
4th: There are some seriously annoying interface issues. When out exploring, you often want to change between eating berries and nuts to heal up and carrying your shock stick or object scanner. There are not configurable hotkeys or boxes on the screen to assign as a quick bar. This is made worse because both of these things exist. There are letter hot keys for construction, destruction, flashlight, ore scanner, mail and you can switch between any of those and your shock prod weapon. There are number hotkeys which seem to be automatically assigned as you begin to be able to build certain things. Right now I have power poles, power lines, conveyor pylons and conveyor belts. But I have to go into my inventory (which doesn't pause the game) and manually drag and drop the items into my "hand slot". This is made worse by the fact that it's pretty particular what counts as making it into the slot and what doesn't. There is no snap area around the slot that works, you have to be directly over it.
These issues are most glaring when exploring. Oh and there are hotkeys for stack splitting, transferring whole stacks etc, but they don't always display them depending on what storage you are interfacing with and they don't work for instance with switching what is in your hand.
Other issue is that feeding power plants is currently manual. You can build a constructor or two to take leaves/wood and turn them into biomass and then turn the biomass in to biogas and then manually feed that into your power plants at the early tier, but you have to manually collect leaves and wood first...fortunately biogas lasts pretty long.
But issues aside as I started getting more tech I got better and having the mats on hand for each level. In fact once I got over the first speed bumps of not enough power and not enough conveyor control, I found I was able to race through almost all of the remaining tech tree until I had to build the space elevator.
Oh and exploration and death. Death sees you respawn back in your hub with nothing and you will have a compass pointer to a chest containing all your stuff from your previous life. Hopefully you have enough in stores at your base to at least build a zapper and head out to get your items.
So my verdict is: I would buy it for $20 no problem. I think $29.95 is a little steep of an ask right now, but would absolutely pay that amount for version 1.0. Their roadmap says the first goals will be fixing crashes etc and minor quality of life changes. Then they plan to start ramping up some of the unexplored resource tech trees (I found sulfer, quartz, and bauxite while out exploring which it seems currently do nothing.
