I suppose I should preface this review with a few disclaimers. First of all, I have not actually completed “Factorio”—I got the game fairly recently and just haven’t had the time or energy to finish a full play-though yet. With that in mind, take everything I say here with a grain of salt. I believe I have experienced enough of the game to have an informed opinion and advise others on whether or not they might enjoy “Factorio,” but I say this with the knowledge I may well be wrong. It is entirely possible there is some part of the very late game, the part I haven’t gotten to yet, that would entirely change my view of it. I don’t think there is, but the possibility is there. Secondly, I do not actually dislike “Factorio,” despite what I am going to say in this review. I paid a full 35 dollars for the game, and I feel I got my money’s worth. However, there is frankly so much praise, and well earned praise, for the game out there that I just don’t feel the need to add to it. If you want to know why “Factorio” is good, look up any review of the game. They will provide you with more reasons than I ever could. Instead, I want to focus here on the oft-ignored flaws and issues that I feel drag “Factorio” down, the parts that feel unfinished or unpolished. And so, with that in mind, let us begin with the most important question: What even is “Factorio”?

Factorio is a video game, first released in early access nine years ago in 2016, then released fully in 2020. It’s part of a small genre I hadn’t really heard of before buying it, automation games, and among its peers is extremely well reviewed at 97% positive ratings on steam. Automation games are, as the name suggests, all about automation—they share some similarity with other base-builders, but set themselves apart by not only allowing nearly every task and process in the game to be automated, but encouraging it and making it challenging. On the surface, the tasks may seem fairly simple—extract metal from the ground with a drill, get that metal to smelters to turn it into plates, get those plates to crafters to turn them into items—but as the game progresses, things quickly start to get tangled up. Many recipes require multiple different resources and often don’t take raw materials to make, but rather heavily processed ones or even finished products. When different parts of your base are producing different things, but they all have to go to the same place to produce something new, and all have to be moved and produced in a timely manner while still leaving enough material for the rest of your factory, these sorts of games can become mind-numbingly complex very quickly.

“Factorio” is, to my eyes, the prime example of this sort of game. Granted, there is a chance I only believe this because it’s the only automation focused game I’ve ever played. The premise is simple. You—a nameless, faceless engineer—have crash-landed on an alien planet. Gather enough resources to build a rocket and escape. It’s an easy concept to grasp, but the execution is much more tricky. You can’t just start producing rocket fuel right off the bat; after all, you lack both the resources and the knowledge. You’ll need to start gathering ore, smelting it down, turning it into products and eventually turning those products into science packs to shove into a laboratory to research new things. But it’s not quite that simple. Everything you do in “Factorio”, every machine you run, produces pollution, and the local wildlife—a strain of giant, man-eating bugs—don’t like it. Herein lies the first serious problem with the game.

The biters, as an enemy, are a really cool idea. They are an ever-evolving horde of disgusting aliens that constantly menace your factory, encouraging you to build quickly, build efficiently and erect walls and turrets to ward off any attacks. Unfortunately, they are also a poorly executed idea that simply doesn’t live up to their potential. They suffer from several key issues—first of all, the simple shallowness of the combat system in general. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a fighting game and I’m not expecting anything too deep, but still. With only two types of bugs and three turret types (all of which do functionally the exact same thing, just with different ammo types), there isn’t really any strategy to be had here. Are the bugs breaching your defenses? Build more turrets, build more walls. That’s really your only option. There are a few special wall designs you can use, but these basically all rely on exploiting the bug’s simplistic AI, which feels cheap. For a game that is normally so hell-bent on making every little process difficult and complex, forcing their players to tackle thorny problems of throughput and bottlenecks, it’s honestly kind of astounding to me how much the bugs have fallen by the wayside.

The second problem with the biters is the paradoxical state of how the player interacts with them. This comes in two parts—first of all, the biter attacks. If the pollution cloud created by the player reaches a biter nest, the biters within will occasionally mobilize to assault your defenses. So far, so good. The problem here is that the attacks are always small, consistent and without warning. Instead of experiencing epic sieges or defensive battles, during my time with “Factorio”, I only ever saw either small groups of bugs be gunned down by my defenses nearly instantly, not even giving me time to rush over and spectate the battle, or a group slip through a hole in my defenses to munch on a few drills or furnaces until I came in and dealt with them. The battles this system creates are boring and mundane; it manages to reduce something inherently epic—defending oneself against an alien menace by building a fortress of walls and guns—into a routine, exasperating task. I’m not thinking about how to defeat the biters when I’m playing “Factorio”, I’m thinking about how the mining outpost was attacked for the third time this hour and I probably need to go over there and refill the turrets with ammo. That’s not what I want to be thinking about when I’m playing a video game.

And then, there’s the second part of this paradox: the bug nests themselves. Now, the bug nests on their own aren’t terribly designed—assaults on bug nests are hampered by the same excessive simplicity of defending yourself against those same bugs, but surprisingly not to the same extent. This is mostly due to the fact that you can’t just repeat the same strategy over and over and eventually win through brute force the way you can with defending yourself, as even if you bring a dozen shotguns, you can only actually use one of them at a time. However, the problem is how these nests tie into the greater threat the bugs pose. Bug attacks only happen when your pollution cloud touches a nest, meaning you are generally incentivized to clear out nearby nests. However, clearing a nest results in a massive spike in the bugs’ evolution level, making them tougher and stronger. This means that the player is punished no matter what they do. Keep the bugs around? They’ll constantly attack you and evolve from eating your pollution. Destroy them? They’ll evolve even more, meaning that when you finally are forced to face them they’ll be way more powerful than you can handle. It puts the player in a situation where there are no good answers, and while I’m fine with games forcing players into making difficult choices, it ceases to be fun when there really isn’t any benefit to any of the choices you can make.

Finally, this brings me to the problem of bug evolution. As I have mentioned before, the bugs have an evolution level. It’s a static percentage that goes from 0 to 100, and is shared across all bug nests. The higher it goes, the bigger, tougher and stronger the bugs become. Again, this is something that sounds cool in theory. The bugs eat your pollution and become more and more of a problem as time goes on. My problem with this is that the evolution level can never go down—while, on the other hand, the bugs can absolutely permanently destroy important parts of your factory. This leaves the player in an awkward situation where they aren’t really allowed to lose in any meaningful way. It’s a race against the clock, and every setback you suffer is permanent—meanwhile, the bugs will just keep growing indefinitely, never stopping or slowing down to accommodate a new or struggling player. There’s functionally no counter-play to the bugs if they start winning, no way to turn the tides once they turn against you save just building more stuff, faster. This does add to the tension of the game, but not really in a good way. There should be some formalized way or mechanic that allows a struggling player to make a comeback; it’s very important for this sort of long-term, arms race game where decisions made at the start can lose you the game 20 hours in. No one wants to lose that much progress because of a series of mistakes they don’t know they made. The game sort of compensates for this by making the bugs generally pretty easy to deal with (assuming you don’t change the settings from the default), but that’s not a good solution; it’s not really a solution at all, in fact. It’s a cop-out.

Now, if you can’t tell, my main problems with “Factorio” are nearly all centered around the biters and how they work. But, because I don’t want to spend this entire review on one thing, I figured I would cover a few smaller complaints before I conclude. First of all, I really think there needs to be more ways to build and deconstruct things in this game. For the entire first half of the game, you are effectively limited to placing and picking up structures one by one, all by hand. This gets very tedious, very quickly, as your factory expands and you start needing to build larger and larger sections to accommodate more goods. Now, you do eventually get construction robots, which mostly solve this problem, but those are a ways into the game and you will need them far before you get them, especially as a new player. Realizing you messed up a part of your factory and need to wipe the slate clean to start again is already daunting enough; the game doesn’t need to make you spend half an hour deconstructing every building by hand on top of that. Given the game’s industrial aesthetic, I think it would make a lot of sense to have some sort of construction vehicle you can build before the construction robots to aid in stuff like this.

Another complaint I have is the odd upgrade trees. For example, belts—the parts of your factory that deliver goods from one place to another—are highly upgradeable. Throughout the game, you will unlock three tiers of belts which allow you to move things at higher and higher speeds. This makes sense. On the other hand, drills have essentially no upgrades. Very early on—as in, within the first hour of gameplay—you will unlock electric drills, which replace the earlier, coal powered variant. But from there? That’s kind of it. There are good reasons you might want to upgrade your drills, especially considering how large and how rich late-game resource patches can get, but for some reason, the game just doesn’t let you do it.

To be clear, as I stated at the beginning, I do like “Factorio”. For all my complaints, it’s a solid game which executes well on it’s initial premise. However … I don’t love “Factorio”. Which is a shame, considering how much time and effort was so evidently put into it and how many people really do seem to play it religiously. For all the rave reviews “Factorio” tends to draw in, I think there are some very legitimate flaws holding it back, and it will never be truly great in my eyes until it addresses them.