The creeping iron heel of progress must march on. Who would care if a planet bereft of human presence is rendered toxic and barren by machine waste? Nobody, that’s who. Well, excepting perhaps the local populace. Nobody who matters.
Ahem.
Factorio is a sandbox game about living out your dreams of industrialism run rampant. You’re a man responsible for building the infrastructure needed achieve some unclear goal, left to accomplish such with just a meager handful of material and a pointy metal stick with which to crack useable alien ground. Luckily, you’re a very smart man, and the machines you’ll build are keen on taking the load off your shoulders.
Extraction drills, conveyor belts, loading arms, and other helpful individually placed pieces form an expanding network of mechanization. As your intentions become more ambitious, so too must your factory. The game breeds a logistical puzzle from concerting the manufacturing of components and the flow of resources. If you take a gander at the devs’ recent trailer, you’ll see that the effort can produce something monstrously complex.
Deadly arthropods, however, are less impressed by your habitat despoiling ways. They’d rather have a nibble on some sensitive electronic equipment. Best to discourage them with some automatic high-velocity lead dispensation stations.
There’s a demo available too, so the interested have no excuse not to give it a try! I took the plunge and purchased a copy, and haven’t regretted it for a moment. It scratches a somewhat rare itch that some of you folks might share with me – the one afflicting those interested in micromanaging the itty bitty nitty gritty of their base structures in strategy games. Just be aware that Factorio is still in its alpha phase.
