Satisfactory Gameplay Preview – First Person Industry

Satisfactory is a unique take on the production line management genre. Instead of managing your production line from an overhead perspective, or interacting with a more abstracted user interface, you take direct control over building and managing your factory from a first person perspective.

Before you start the game, you can select your preferred planet type. Some planets provide more of a challenge by having less resources or having resources spread apart while the easier ones present abundant resources close together. As you start out the game, you have to collect materials manually using your chisel, and then later on, automatic resource collectors.

As you progress, you unlock upgrades to your main HUB, which unlock new technology modules that automate a certain aspect to your production line. For example, as you progress in the game, you unlock the ability to harvest resources automatically, collect the resources into a storage unit, and then send them to be smelted and then forged into components.

Connecting all of these automated modules together are a network of conveyor belts. The conveyor belts add a distinctly unique flavor to satisfactory as building, maintaining, and managing your network of belts will get increasingly difficult. As you start building complex items, they require many components, often using the same base materials. This, and the lack of space, require you to build a sprawling network that spans many floors vertically, and many intersectional areas where belts join or split to carry different resources to their destinations.

Sounds absolutely breathtaking, I know. As a fan of production lines in general, this game offers a nice balance of farming, fighting aliens, and managing your production lines. The game is challenging enough without being frustrating and as you master the mechanics, the game introduces new ones at a pace to offer you something new at every turn.

Satisfactory makes production line management sims more accessible and appealing by providing a fresh, and satisfying, take on the genre.