Ah, Factorio. Truly a modern classic in the indie gaming scene, and a solid contender for the single best indie video game of all time. Fair warning that my review will be more than a little bit biased here. Factorio is my most played game on Steam of all time, by a long shot at well over 2,000 hours at this point, and for good reason. So what exactly has earned Factorio all this praise?


First, let's talk about what Factorio even is. It's a game about research, production, industrialization, automation, logistics, and if you like, defense planning and border security. It's a top-down, 2D factory building game. You claim resources, process them into their refined counterparts, and manufacture more machines to build more things along the way. There's mining, smelting, transport belts, assemblers, steam, solar, and nuclear power, oil processing, gun and laser turrets, flying robots, and trains, and it can all be automated.

As you may know, your goal is to launch a rocket into space. Of course, there is a clear path to get there if you look through the tech tree, but how you get there is entirely up to you. There are dozens of raw materials and intermediaries, research options that unlock new technologies, and countless ways to optimize your setup for maximum efficiency. If you really want to flex your mental muscles, you can even use the circuit network to leverage much finer control over certain aspects of your factory to tweak how it behaves, to make it self-managing and error proof, or eke out just a little extra efficiency.

Unfortunately, the planet that you have to construct your factory on has its own native inhabitants, the Zerg-like biters, spitters, and worms. The biters are constantly expanding, and will openly attack you and your factory if you encroach on their territory, or if your factory's pollution spreads to their airspace. This urges you to think about defenses, invest valuable resources into walls, turrets, and ammunition, and research more effective weapons, all while restricting you from expanding too quickly and spreading yourself too thin. Resources aren't infinite either and will eventually run dry, forcing you to expand further to keep your factory running - this makes combat inevitable, and you will have to adapt to survive.

One of the best things about Factorio is that it's not a race. You can launch the rocket in under 8 hours to get the most coveted achievement in the game (other than the Lazy Bastard achievement), or you can take your ease and play the same save for 50 hours. Or 100 hours. Or 200 hours, or 500, or 1,000. There isn't much left to be done after you launch the rocket, but the beauty of that is you can start a new game and play through it again. That's a perfect segue into the next point.


There's a good reason why the average Factorio player can spend hundreds of hours on a single save game, just to start all over again from scratch on a new save. It's because in a game like Factorio, it's not about the destination, but rather the journey. While it's easy to get caught up in launching the rocket, you may find yourself easily addicted simply moving from one task to the next to get there - hence the moniker "Cracktorio". There's always something that needs to be built or upgraded, and often times, you will have to take a break to fend off the biters or go claim more territory from them.

Entire parts of your factory can be blueprinted, saving them forever to your blueprint library which goes everywhere with you, meaning once you have part of your factory down to a science, redesigning it is optional. However, as you get more experience playing the game, you will learn about things like production ratios, the coveted "main bus", and other techniques and optimizations that you can use to redo or tweak your designs. This incentivizes you to experiment and play with your factory until you're happy with it. Also, every time something goes wrong in your factory, you have to be able to troubleshoot why it's not working and how to fix it, which is half the fun of the game. The most common cause of something going wrong is either a shortage of resources, or a problem with the design, meaning if you screw up, you only have yourself or the biters to blame (unless you're in multiplayer)!

Factorio also features trains for long distance mass transport of materials and products. Even someone who has played OpenTTD can understand the basics of how the trains work, but the control mechanisms are very deep, and can be fine-tuned to make your trains behave exactly how you want them to. Train stations can also connect to the circuit network so that the conditions can be modified and controlled how you see fit. The trains will run on time!

Since Factorio's game world is procedurally generated, you will never be in the same world twice. This helps keep the experience fresh and forces you to focus on overall process refinement and exploration rather than predetermined locations.


By calculating the ratios of your production and consumption, you can compensate by building the right number of machines to match the ratio for maximum efficiency. You can also use the circuit network to put conditions on when and how each of your machines operate, and use wires along with so-called combinators to build out control logic for parts of your factory. As a personal challenge, you can even try to solve a problem using as few combinators as possible (or even none at all!) to achieve the desired behavior. This allows you to fine tune your factory, and maximize your efficiency by setting conditions on each of the little cogs in your one big machine.

Not only is Factorio is about optimizing your factory, but even the game itself is optimized to the Nth degree. The developers of Factorio have painstakingly gone to great lengths to make their game run incredibly smoothly despite the tens if not hundreds of thousands of entities in your factory. Updates per second, or UPS, is a measure of how performant your own factory is against the game engine itself, and the player is actively encouraged to design around UPS as a limitation. Although this is irrelevant for 99% of your playtime due to how well the game runs, it can be fun to try and maximize your UPS in your late-game or post-rocket "mega-factory". Factorio is a very high quality and well-made game, which brings me to my next point.


Factorio is of course an indie game, and sometimes indie developers can be hit-or-miss. Not so with Factorio's devs, Wube Software! Wube is a Czech company with amazing developers. A bit of trivia that they revealed in one of their development blog posts is that Wube is an abbreviation of the phrase "Wszystko będzie", which roughly translates to "Everything will be done eventually". Never has this statement been truer than with Wube Software. They have outdone themselves in polishing Factorio to be the brilliant indie gem that it is, playing their own game, going back and fixing things and polishing core game mechanics, and listening to community feedback.

Oh yeah, and about that dev blog. Factorio Friday Facts is an episodic dev blog that is hosted on the Factorio website, where Wube releases a new blog every Friday to chronicle their development of the game. Everything you can imagine would be in such a dev blog is discussed, and then some - from the biggest features, to the smallest tweaks, to the most minute and technical details about the interworkings of the engine itself. Also, their patch notes are quite meticulous.

Since its inception, Factorio has been iterated on countless times, going from a proof of concept to one of the best indie games of all time. And it's still in active development, with an expansion and 2.0 on the horizon!


10/10 - A perfect ten. Hats off, Wube. Factorio is a masterpiece.

The year is 336 BC. You are a shield bearer in a phalanx formation, shoulder to shoulder with fellow shield bearers and backed up by the mighty spears of the sarissas, which are poking out in front of you. Another phalanx is several meters in front of yours, taking point. You are pushing into the next town on the last legs of a long and weary campaign. You're a seasoned veteran shield bearer. Your mates trust you with their lives. That thin piece of wood you're holding is the only thing standing between glory and shame, victory and defeat, life and death.

Up ahead, you hear the second phalanx start to engage with the enemy. The utter silence has broken out into battle cries and screams of panic. "Are we winning?" you think to yourself. After all, you can't see anything.

More shouting and panic abounds. You look up from your shield, but immediately wish you hadn't. High above your head, the bodies of were once the first phalanx division are punctured by countless arrows, being held in unnatural positions and steadily floating upwards, with what appears to be...

"BALLOONS...?!"

Before you can react, you feel several thunks of arrows hitting your shield, their arrowheads slightly poking through the other side. You hear several loud hissing noises. Something is pulling up on your shield! Wait... Could it be? No way.

You feel your feet come off the ground. You're hanging onto your shield now for dear life, knowing that letting go will mean falling to your death.

You look around in utter panic to see your fellow shield bearers being lifted in the air by arrows that are tied with balloons. Screams echo around you. You look down and see the sarissas have all been killed, their bodies punctured with arrows and floating upwards. The broken corpses of the first phalanx lay on the ground in front of your target... a bunch of giggling archers in funny clothing - the likes of which design seems ridiculous, yet fashionable. You've never seen such attire within all of the cities you've conquered thus far.

The archers prepare another volley.

"Oh, Gods..."

It's too late. More arrows fly. Many of them miss, but... one pierces your leg! Hopeless, you cry out in pain, and more hissing ensues as the balloon inflates. But the worst is yet to come - the laws of physics are a cruel mistress. The strings detach in your shield! Now off-balance, the arrow in your leg yanks you upward into a spin, hanging you upside-down! Your thoughts blur as your balance diminishes and the blood rushes to your head. Discombobulation and pain are the only two feelings you can comprehend.

Of course, what goes up eventually must come down. Suddenly, you feel the balloon detach from the arrow in your leg. You look up in horror to see that the helium-powered forces which were holding you in high the air are now flying way above your head. Gravity pulls you downward so fast that your stomach jumps into your throat. You're in free fall!

There's only one thing that happens next... and perhaps, right now, a swift end to this madness is just a blessing.

You close your eyes and brace for impact.

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10/10: TABS is the most quirky battle simulation game I've ever had the great pleasure of playing. It has wonky physics, hilarious situations, great and funny audio design, wide variety of units, and - perhaps best of all, as exemplified in this review - the sheer and utter chaos!