Best Sandbox 2024: Satisfactory
Coal for Christmas? Not to worry—our favourite sandbox of 2024 will let you turn it into an ever-expanding web of useful materials. For more awards, check out our Game of the Year 2024 hub.
Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor: Satisfactory is a different game for me depending on the week. Recently I found myself in the thick of the jungle on the far side of the map from the friendly green plains I'd first started building in; I had to go a long way to find iron deposits rich enough to let me build a towering, multi-floor factory dedicated to modular frames. They're just boring metal cubes, but for a week I obsessively arranged a perfectly balanced system of inputs and outputs for each individual component—the iron rods, the iron plates, the steel pipes—until the sum total of all that effort amounted to 21 frames per minute and a glass penthouse overlooking a waterfall at the edge of the world.
Did I need to build a skyscraper? Was it the most efficient use of my time to thread power towers across multiple biomes so I could zipline my way to the outer reaches? I stopped asking myself those kinds of questions hundreds of hours ago, long before Satisfactory left early access this year. This game is ostensibly about efficiency and optimization, but the real joy comes when you stop building to complete the objectives and start creating for the sake of it. Making parts is the point, but it also barely matters at all. I've since moved on from my frame factory to crisscrossing the map with train lines. It'll keep me busy for a few months at least.
Satisfactory has the same endlessness as Minecraft, only trading the RPG-esque mechanics for the compulsive satisfaction of arranging conveyor belts at perfect 90 degree angles and building realistic supporting struts for factories that the game would let me leave floating in the air if I chose to thumb my nose at gravity. There was a potential early access path that leaned more into survival meters or more specific objectives and endless missions to complete, but those things aren't remotely as compelling as the expressiveness Satisfactory 1.0 embraced instead. The final game is rife with paints and lighting and girders and windows and angled roofs and walls that combine into monolithic masterpieces in YouTube videos that first smack of the impossible, and then drive me to want to be even more creative myself. It's one of the best videogame spaces you can exist in in 2024, and maybe my game of the decade.
Jake Tucker, Editorial Director, PC Gaming Show: At first all I cared about in Satisfactory was how to make my production lines as efficient as possible. After a hundred hours, I decided that was silly and all I really wanted to do was convert the planet into my own personal playground, letting me jump and zipline around the planet with aplomb. Maybe capitalism is good?
Nick Evanson, Hardware writer: If I was being uncharitable, I could summarise Satisfactory as simply being Factorio in 3D, but it's far more deserving than that. Fundamentally, the gameplay elements are very similar (collect resources, build stuff, watch a big rocket leave the planet), but the additional dimension means structures are more than mere machines. I have spent countless hours just rejigged pipelines, walls, supply belts, and so on, all to create a factory that's not just as efficient as possible, but as visually impressive as it can be. Naturally, my first attempts were a veritable plate of spaghetti, but given that Rome wasn't built in a day, neither can one expect the same here. Add in the creativity of Minecraft and you have my perfect game. Well, my perfect game of 2024, that's for sure.
Phil Savage, Global Editor-in-Chief: Yeah, I've seen some Factorio fans dismiss Satisfactory as being a more simple alternative, and there is some truth to that. Your resource nodes don't run out, and you can craft storage boxes that beam materials directly into your inventory through extra-dimensional magic—there are a lot of subtle tweaks that make the logistical element less taxing. But really, Satisfactory is just shifting the challenge elsewhere. The fact that resource nodes are infinite means that you're not encouraged to build a central bus system for your most valuable materials, but to instead create lots of individual factories each tailored to one main product. The challenge is one of spatial organisation, creating complex production lines that efficiently achieve your desired result.
I'm still relatively early in my Satisfactory career—by which I mean I've played about 70 hours since the 1.0 launch. Unlike Wes, I am not creating grand skyscrapers. Most of my factories are on 10x10 foundation grids; gravity defying, utilitarian monstrosities that let me concentrate on figuring out the mechanics of efficiency in this world. And every time I feel like I get it—that all that remains is the busy work of doing everything I'd already done, but more and bigger—some new set of recipes come along to offer a different kind of challenge. My last 10 or so hours were spent figuring out oil, and the satisfying problem of recycling byproducts without bricking the whole production line. It may not look pretty, but damn does it feel good when you see these machines whirr to life—each perfectly calibrated to toil away forever without waste.