Final Factory Early Access Impressions – The Tiny Factory Must Grow

It’s cool to see more takes on the factory builder/automation games. And with Never Games’ latest game Final Factory, it has potential to be something cool. What if a factory builder but the combat is a bullet hell shoot-’em-up? And what if you not only just build automated factories not only for the sake of growing a factory, but growing your fleet of spaceships?

It is a good thing Final Factory is still in Early Access, though. Because I find the execution of this idea still lacking in various aspects. But I do wish to see the devs, and its community, help shape this little game to be something special.

What’s This, a Factory Builder For Ants?

The one thing that has been bugging me with my time playing Final Factory is how tiny everything looks. You can zoom in really, really close to see the details, but also zoom out really, really really far. To the point that your ship that you control directly is just a tiny pixel dot on the screen. It’s that far. I appreciate the scale the game wants to portray here, surely wants you build a factory big enough that zoomed out screen will make some sense. And bring some awe.

But right now, I have to keep squinting when playing Final Factory. Not because of the camera zoom, however. But rather due to the UI. The tutorial texts are tiny and the way the UI is designed it comes out all fuzzy making texts harder to read. It doesn’t look like it in screenshots, but on my screen during gameplay, the soft lighting glow on the menus negatively impact how I see the UI.

The icons for various buildings are unique, the buildings themselves are distinct but it takes a lot of squinting for me to find the right building to plop from the inventory. Because the icons are too tiny. It doesn’t help that the games uses an inventory system and you can only plop the buildings by selecting it from the inventory. Unlike the crafting menu where the building icons remain in the same positions, the inventory screen doesn’t. And that means you have to scour through the boxes and see which tiny icon was that you need to grab. I tended to mistakenly click the icon the crafting menu instead of the inventory when I want to plop a building.

And when you plop a building, it assumes a blueprint mode in that you can still place buildings on the space even if you don’t have any more buildings in the inventory. Should you have them, constructor bots will place them automatically when you are in range. That’s fine. What’s not fine is having to right click to dismiss the item placing mode, which I usually do after left-clicking. And doing that means I immediately cancel that placement of that item, as right-click also doubles as removing a building (which requires holding the click for a few seconds in the case of a plopped building, but instantaneously if it’s not).

What I’m trying to say is that Final Factory doesn’t feel intuitive to play blindly. There will be many misclicks and times wasted staring at a screen as you have to learn the quirks of how the factory building in this game works, but also how to do the simplest task. I still don’t know how to put items in the hotkey. And I don’t think I want to, those icons are just as tiny! The UI scaler in the options menu isn’t enough.

A Different Paradigm In Factory Building

This next point seems to be negative criticism, but that’s due to the game not being intuitive enough for a player to learn on its own. But it does highlight Final Factory’s greatest strength: the way you build your factory is much, much different to the genre staples.

The tutorial walks you through the basics. Plop a mining station, hook it to an atomic printer (process raw resource into an intermediary resource), then send it to the assembler (to combine multiple resources into components) and then to a ship assembler (to create ships). It’s simple, but also highlights some fundamental difference of Final Factory’s factory building design. Connectors (i.e. the conveyor belt equivalent) cannot turn, and Junctions are locked to a research upgrade. Processing buildings doesn’t have a specific direction it must be connected to. And there’s a limit to how big the connected structures can be. So that means, no you cannot make a spaghetti mess that somehow works in Final Factory.

Instead of a sprawl, Final Factory requires you to build clusters of independent structures, each with their own independent power source and radiators. You are discouraged in making long Connector routes as that wastes structure space. You can make the structure more stable by linking struts to other small buildings, or place a Station Core, but there’s a hard limit on how much you get out of placing those things.

But there are cool ways to connect different structures together. Instead of routing a long Connector tube from one asteroid resource to another, you can connect two cargo hold boxes together with an Inserter bot that moves resources from one box to another. Or for longer ranges, place two logistics bay to connect a cargo drone to do the transporting. There are also ways to share power this way too, as you shoot lasers from one station to another.

I believe that the tutorial did a poor job at highlighting Final Factory’s interesting way of factory building. The game needs to guide players how to connect two stations, and the tutorial on structure integrity needed a once over as I still don’t quite get how far I should go with connecting struts to claw back integrity. I kept connecting struts and not seeing results, clearly I’m doing something wrong, but I don’t understand why, and that’s due to me not grasping how this feature truly works.

That all said, I find the factory building a breath of fresh air. For factory building fans, you’ll be learning a new way to design factories, and that’s not only fun, that should be a selling point.

Pew-Pew Bullet Hell

So how is the combat aspects of Final Factory? I find it rather… lacklustre. Your main ship gains access to different skills and attacks based on what ships you have in the fleet. Enemies periodically invade you, and you can explore the map, uncover the fog of war and assault the enemies.

Side note: the fog effects for the fog of war is immaculate and mesmerising. It’s ominous, yet tantalising. The effect of it dispersing as you get close to it is satisfying to look, and is impactful enough to make me want to uncover the fog more and more.

Unfortunately the shooting bits don’t feel impactful. It’s less bullet hell, more unsatisfying Vampire Survivors. So a not-good reverse bullet hell/bullet heaven game then. Uncovering a huge swarm of enemies was terrifying at first, and then when I realised that it does nothing threaten cheapness the experience. Maybe it needs something to sell the oomph of the damage you deal and take. Right now, I just waltz in, see how many ships in the fleet I have, and if ticks down rather low, I waltz out. If not, just circle around the area until it all.

Closing Thoughts

As much as I have complaints about Final Factory’s Early Access release, I admit that this is a good factory builder. Once I sit down and just come to its terms and play it, I was seated for hours and didn’t want to stop. A true hallmark of a good builder/grower game is that players just can’t stop playing it, and Final Factory is able to do that.

I sure hope the game improves in its rough edges. It has the potential to be an addicting factory builder with a unique twist to combat. As it is right now, it’s still fun, but you’ll need to be able to deal with what I consider not-good UI to find the fun. It’s there, you have to work for it.

Played on PC. Early Access code provided by the developer.

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