Recent reviews by urm

StS 1 was good, the second one is even better!

The idea of building a factory out of tiles that you draw randomly from a bag, while you know the order of the tiles in the bag, and most of it is just infrastructure and no production... just doesn't work in my opinion. The whole point of the automation genre is planning. And you have all the information to plan around here, but it's packaged in a very tedious and frankly boring process. Drawing from a random bag is good when most of the possibilities are exciting, and there is something to do with whatever you draw - that's very much not the case here

Quite cool! This is a reasonably polished game, rather unique casting system, otherwise quite bog standard slay the spire like affair.

In the demo the boss fight is rather grindy, it had more HP than every mob before it combined :)

Some things like the shop reset or the hand limit could be communicated better, and curses just seem very punishing compared to all other effects, hopefully the UX and balance improve in the full release

Space age is amazing. Factorio's main weakness has always been a somewhat linear "build order". Your technological choices were quite limited - mostly you'd pick power sources, whether to bother with military science, and whether to go for utility or productivity science first. Space Age completely resolve that issue.
Now you can go to space early, or late. Go to Vulcanus, Fulgora and Gleba in any order, with different challenges as a result of that choice. You can produce the same materials in different ways, with or without imported materials and machines.

Factorio's second weakness has always been that building better stuff was not really different from building more stuff. Why bother with Assembler 3 when you can just use Assembler 2s? Why bother with modules when you can just mine more ore, make more power, produce more ammo? Some mods made space more of a resource, but ultimately you pretty much always had enough.
Space Age changes that. Between space platforms, Fulgora's islands, Demolishers and Pentapods making it hard to expand, building small is better than ever, with improved circuits, new quality mechanics, and extremely space efficient buildings.

Overall the game's more polished and interesting than ever, with some occasional jank related to quality and space logistics. Buy it now! (after beating the base game, or god save you from the pentapods)

Satisfactory is a mostly competent automation game overall, that gets brought down by completely flawed fundamentals. In a game about building massive factories they got the most important thing radically wrong - the building. It's annoying at best, and frustrating most of the time.

It's really not clear what they were thinking. There is a sort of grid system for buildings of 1m, but it's not represented by anything visual in the game. There are foundations, but they are 8x8, and almost none of the buildings align with the foundations. This is the fundamental (pun intended) issue, and many of the others come as a result of it, but every single category of buildings is clunky and unintuitive to place. Comparing that to any other major automation game, and Satisfactory comes out way behind.

Belts are obnoxious in this game. They have a minimal length, so connecting two buildings directly next to each other is (sometimes) not possible. Except it's unreliable, because the grid is not actually a grid, so you are at the mercy of floating point calculations. That's not even a game design flaw, just a technical competency flaw at the very core of the game. Dragging long belts is extraordinarily tedious, as they have a maximum length, but there is nothing visualizing that maximum length, So you randomly run around, placing foundations until you hit the range by accident.

Belt splitters and mergers are even worse. You can have belts that visually connect to a splitter slot, but don't *actually*, so nothing will come in or out. What's worse is that you can remove an existing splitter, replace it with a different one, and some of the belts will be connected, while others won't...
Splitters also have an internal inventory, which is not visible in any way. This is particularly annoying for smart splitters, as if they get clogged by an unexpected item by accident, the only way to even notice the issue is to destroy the smart splitter. Which means you need to replace the 4 connecting belts as well due to the previous issue.

Probably the worst aspect of building are the blueprints. Satisfactory has easily the weakest and most buggy blueprint system of any automation game I've played. The blueprint size is gated by game progression, so certain types of buildings are not possible to usefully blueprint until the late game, or never at all. For example railway intersections, a very obvious thing to blueprint, are way too large to fit even the largest blueprint, so enjoy building an identical intersection dozens of time in your playthrough.

Pipes are a whole other story. They attempted some kind of fluid simulation, but it sucks. It doesn't make any sense, the game explains none of it, and the community has not figured out the rules. There is just a collection of tricks that usually work, but sometimes not, and nobody knows why. The devs even acknowledge that pipes are frustrating https://youtu.be/HfR91OOh_zwt , but for some reason think that they are not worth the time to fix because "players already use them". No ♥♥♥♥ players use them, you can't finish the game without using pipes, it's the most useless metric imaginable.

Speaking of things that players don't use, hypertubes. The only meaningful way anybody uses them is by building "hypertube cannons". The problem with that is they appear to be unintentional - hypertube entrance acceleration stacks infinitely, so you can launch yourself at ridiculous speeds. However it's quite easy to go so fast as to crash the game...
Meanwhile the "naive" and seemingly intended use of hypertubes is completely nonsensical. They are terrible at long and medium range transportation - they are just too slow, and you have many options which unlock earlier and move faster. They'd be perfect for short range movement, as a fancy stair of sorts - but for some reason hypertubes consume a significant amount of power at all times, so you are not going to spam them in your blueprints and small factories. You also have access to jump pads way earlier than hypertubes, which take less power, move you faster, and the only real cost is larger footprint, and you are never limited by space in Satisfactory, only by your own aversion to placing floating foundation in the sky.

I could keep listing flawed systems of this game for a long time. Many people enjoy the decorative aspect of Satisfactory, and while you have lots of options there, the relevant systems are just as clunky and buggy to use as the rest.

Overall it's a passable casual automation game, which is okay to play in coop, but I would not recommend it unless you are bored of the less janky automation games like Factorio, Oxygen not Included, Shapez (2), or what have you.

#fixtf2

This game was originally supposed to be a singleplayer campaign. Now they are finally releasing it as a different game. They will supposedly provide the new game for free for people who bought this one in EA, but the way they are doing it is rather clumsy. Steam does have mechanisms for providing exclusive deals, so I'm not sure why they want people to send emails. Apparently they will also not compensate people who bought Stride outside of Steam, which is not great.

The game itself is fine, but really not worth with its current content. The endless mode was supposed to be a placeholder until the campaign exists, and it is still more or less in the same shape. I've never been able to play a multiplayer match of any of the mode, which is not surprising, pretty much no multiplayer VR games have the player counts to sustain even a single match at a time.

Literally 2.0, still no functional keybinding UI. Time to edit an .ini file in 2023...

It's a very lazy port from consoles. No keybindings, no mouse support in UI. Immediately drops you into an escort tutorial mission with trivial difficulty, "teaching" you such advanced concepts as pressing WASD to move.

Some core mechanics of Hawken still seem to be mostly intact, so maybe the gameplay is alright later on, but so far this seems to be a generic dumb console shooter with very little thought put into it.

Edit: I've played a couple more missions, and it doesn't get any better. The combat is trivial and meaningless, objectives boring and lazy (hack a generator to stop a data transmission, then hack backup after backup after backup), writing is cringy, voice acting unenthusiastic at best (and there is a LOT of talking). Overheating mechanics are missing, replaced with meaningless ammo, which drops out of every tiny enemy in abundance. Hawken is dead for good.

Terrible default hotkeys, no reasonable way to change them. Took them an entire trilogy to figure out this is a problem...