The factory has grown
To say thatFactorio: Space Agethrows out the rulebook is an understatement.
With each new planet and each new phase, Space Age reinvents itself.
I’m battling hyperbole here, but ah hell, I admit defeat.
Aside from a handful of quality of life changes, you basically just play a new game of Factorio.
Punch rocks and trees.
Place miners on iron and copper.
Spin plates that keep everything manually fed until you have some boilers and steam engines up and running.
Automate your first science packs.
Research your first few techs so you’re free to do everything again, but bigger and better.
Me though, I’ve always been a factory game addict.
The moment I started to craft my first rocket, my production levels ground to a halt.
None of my previous knowledge helped me up there in alien territory.
Goodbye, efficiency and careful calculations.
Greetings, endless bottlenecks, asteroid collisions, and staring at item descriptions without even a modicum ofgorm.
It sounds frustrating, but I loved every moment.
If I ever got tired, I’d just chill out and watch the gorgeous animations on the spaceship.
The foundations unfurling themselves bit by bit like chunky metal origami.
The Doc Ock tentacles of the asteroid collectors, yoinking nearby chunks of metal and carbon out of space.
The animations have always been stellar in Factorio, but the new buildings are works of art.
Eventually I got to my first new planet - Vulcanus.
And the rulebook had once again been shredded.
Vulcanus feels truly different.
Not just in the atmosphere and landscape, but the processes themselves.
Familiar resources were present, but the ways I got hold of them were completely different.
There were no iron or copper patches on the ground.
Before I could do anything worthwhile, I needed a power source.
But what to use?
Steam power sounded good, but how could I get water for steam on a lava planet?
Hey presto, you’ve got steam power on Vulcanus!
And what a delightful process of discovery it was.
But hey, now I know for next time.
Gradually, I saw possibilities.
At least the demolishers were passive.
Up in orbit, my ship Hephaestus continued to be caressed by asteroids.
And back on Nauvis, my turrets steadily ran out of ammo and were being destroyed by Biter attacks.
That was a new kind of tension I hadn’t felt before in Factorio, and it was brilliant.
Thankfully some fast, focused work allowed me to cobble together a rocket and head back up to Hephaestus.
15 hours of worms and lava was enough to make Hephaestus feel quite nostalgic.
It was a real moment of triumph.
Space Age does nothing to help onboard new players and is as dense as ever.
Probably much more so.
All of Wube’s signature depth and engineering quality is present in nearly every part of Space Age.
And from everything I’ve seen so far, Space Age is what Factorio was always meant to be.
