If you were to ask the average gamer about Factorio, they would probably say "What the hell are you talking about", but if you were to ask someone who HAD heard about the game, they would probably tell you that it's very addicting. With endless potential for improving your factory and a low-pressure environment to do it in, it's easy to get invested and keep incrementally optimizing for hours. However, if you're not the kind of person that typically likes those games, Factorio is difficult to recommend. It's the gold standard of its niche, but it doesn't spend much energy giving guidance or setting goals to entice the newcomers. Luckily, it has a low price point of $20, so it's worth a go.

Actual addiction.
+ A problem is presented. A solution is made - by you. The solution is deployed. You unlock the next problem. You realize your previous solution needs polishing. Repeat.
+ Excellent sound. Atmospheric noises to study/sleep to.
+ Huge QOL improvements since launch, and it just keeps getting better.
+ The huge amount of community content ensures that even when you finish the game and assorted challenge runs, you will Never be done.

The first time I played this I had trouble remembering to eat, sleep, and go to the toilet. It's pure-bliss crack-cocaine energy of devise and optimise had me enthralled once I got in the swing of things. The drones were the coolest thing ever once I unlocked them. One day though, my base suffered from a power-failure due to an over-reliance on dwindling coal supplies as a fuel source in the mid-game, and my base was overrun with biters because I was using nothing but laser-turrets in my defenses.

Playing the game through from the beginning the second time wasn't quite the same, and hasn't been since. Developing new technologies was a lot of the enjoyment I got out of the game, and subsequent playthroughs feel quite repetitive. I can't really be bothered with mods in this particular game.

But I'm always open to coming back to it, and this game will always go down in history for me because of that first initial playthrough.

Also, the game just seems to be so nicely and efficiently made, I never witnessed any bugginess and I gotta respect that.

I should love this game.

It's one of the few things most people in my life agree on. That Factorio, the autism-feeding factory simulator, should appeal to me, the autist who loves factory games. I've been told this by like 40 separate people, myself and also my stepdad.

But, no. I've tried to give it a fair crack for like three years now, and it's just not landing.

The core is good. It's a factory game. You dig up coal/iron/copper (It's always coal, iron and copper...) to build machines that do things for you so you can do more things and get more resources to make more machines that do more things until eventually you've done the same amount of planning and logistics work that goes into a CIA's disruption of a small country's economy.

The issues arrive when it comes to anything outside the basic core.

For starters, there's the map generation. Factorio's early game is horrifically slow even on a 'good' start, to the point where there's a not-insignificant number of mods to skip it. On a 'bad' start, it's horrific.

A 'good' start in Factorio is one where your immediate needs (water, stone, wood, iron, coal, copper and oil) are arranged in such a way that you can slap a factory in the middle and effortlessly plug the resources into its veins. Even with this boon, there's still an absurd amount of mostly eventless walking and waiting around for conveyor belts to craft so you can get things plugged in.

A bad start, then, is one lacking this cohesion, and my god does the map generator love to shit them out. My recent run stalled because my factory needed more coal than my overrun deposits could extract, and the nearest deposit was on the other side of the available map.

I get that the point is that, at some point, you'll have access to bots and trains that make long distance logistics trivial, but it feels terrible to get there becauseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

The research system is just awful. My god. My goodness gracious. On paper I don't entirely hate it, it's a good way to keep older resources in circulation without having to bog you down with junk recipes.

Except in practice, the science system is a bunch of junk recipes and the amount of automation/logistics needed to fully automate research scales up so harshly compared to every other part of the game. Ore extraction, power acquisition and distribution, ammo manufacturing, factory defense... These all scale up linearly, I have no issues with them.
Science, it feels, scales up exponentially. You need so much, to the point where regardless of progress my runs just utterly stall because I end up fixating on JUST science. It's so vital to progression that putting it off even until later just feels utterly non-negotiable. Much like how Cities: Skylines is more of a traffic sim than a city builder, this game feels like more of a server maintenance simulator than anything.

And lastly, the combat just sucks. I love the idea of having something to react to - and continually mourn its absence in Satisfactory - but the bugs just don't feel good. Sure, it's nice to make ammo factories to burn them down, but this entire third of the game just feels like it peaks obscenely fast. Even with various worldgen tweaks to make them more frustrating, it only takes a couple hours for them to downgrade to a nuisance and further fall.

Overall, it's just not clicking and I don't think it ever will. All the depth in the world isn't worth the frustrating bits, and while I'm thankful to Factorio for spawning the automation genre I also vastly prefer its imitators for not even bothering with the worst bits.

Here's hoping Foundry is good.