Satisfactory Review: Building a Dream Factory, One Conveyor at a Time

Have you ever wanted to secretly test your co-op-friends’ personalities to find out who you are sharing your secrets with every day? Or did you want an impression of how high or low your partners’ conscientiousness levels are before moving into one household?

Well, we have the perfect opportunity for you to learn more about each and every co-op player's personality without setting them up with a pen-and-paper psychology test: Satisfactory! When playing Satisfactory in co-op, you will not only be able to tell which one of your friends and family embraces chaos to the fullest without regrets, or which one of you is getting sidetracked the most and therefor lands the closest to a fruit fly's attention span (which is as low as 3 seconds, by the way - wait, is that a banana over there?!). You will also find out about hidden talents, such as which one of you has a strong sense of coordination and project leading or a hidden talent for architectural and technical building.

In Satisfactory, a first-person building and automation game, you are exploring an alien planet that is to be cultivated into an efficient, automated factory. You will build simple production chains at first, which gradually become more complex and challenging. While the game is a lot of fun when played in single-player mode, playing in co-op truly adds a lot to the experience, making it a social, dynamic, shared, and collaborative adventure. Satisfactory is developed by Coffee Stain Studios and had been in Early Access for around 5 years, receiving many updates and fixes, before launching successfully into Version 1.0 on September 10, 2024. It is available for PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), PlayStation, and Xbox and supports cross-platform. Up to 4 players (including the games’ host) can play together in online co-op.

In this review, we will take a look at the general gameplay flow, with a strong focus on the co-op aspects, including collaboration, group dynamics, conflict potential, and more. To wrap things up, we will discuss technical aspects, as well as accessibility and potential sensitive content for some. We will give our recommendation for which types of players should pick Satisfactory up and who might not enjoy the game.

Your journey in Satisfactory starts with choosing your starting location on the planet. For beginners just starting out with their first playthrough, you should follow the game’s recommendations of difficulty even if you have differing aesthetic preferences. The more advanced areas add challenges of their own that might lead to feeling overwhelmed for beginners. If you want to customize your experience, the player hosting the game can always adjust some settings, such as non-hostile animals.

After landing in your chosen biome with only basic equipment, your team will have to settle for a spot to set down your HUB, the heart of your factory. The HUB features a craft bench and the HUB Terminal, which is Satisfactory’s progression system. By fulfilling item delivery quests, you will unlock new buildings, tools, and equipment. The first progression tier at the HUB Terminal integrates two biomass burners to the HUB, which are your first energy production buildings. From there, you can start exploring your surroundings, gather ores you see, and collect tree branches and leaves to turn into energy at the biomass burners. Build a miner on an ore mine and add more buildings to form a small production chain. Besides building and managing your factory, exploration plays a big role in Satisfactory. Set out to scout for materials, mysterious items, slugs, and crashed containers.

After some hours of gameplay and progression through the milestone system at the HUB Terminal, your factory’s complexity will have increased by a lot. Automation becomes essential to keep up with the demand of items needed for your advancement. You will unlock new means of personal and goods transportation and ways to traverse the lands faster. You will learn about the games’ lore by analyzing alien artifacts and uncovering secrets about the native alien race and your A.I. companion ADA.

The late and endgame is all about optimization and, for everyone enjoying this part of the game, beautification. There is a sense of accomplishment when all parts of your factory work together perfectly. Watching the produced goods flow over rows and levels of conveyor belts is just as satisfying as finishing up an elegant multi-story architectural gem of a factory. You can spend more time perfecting, exploring, or optimizing until you are fully pleased with your build. There are near endless possibilities of building something even more impressive every day, as Satisfactory’s community proves every day when sharing videos and pictures of their in-game monuments. 

Satisfactory on normal difficulty is in itself not a very difficult game. If you wish to adjust your game session further, be it a more casual or more challenging experience, you may do so in the settings. Many gameplay elements are very forgiving and relaxed, such as the fact that there are no survival elements like starvation. You can just plan, build, progress, and explore at your own pace. This makes it the ideal multiplayer title to form a fun experience for all types of players, including all ages and abilities. Whether you’re playing with veterans of building-automation games that strategize, plan, and execute with precision or with people that just want to spend time exploring or have a laid-back journey with a minimalistic but very interesting voiced story.

Whether you’re only able to play together every once in a while or want to regularly spend time in the game, Satisfactory offers the tools to keep you in the picture. There are to-do lists and notepads that you can use for memos for your next session. And even if you only have 30 minutes of time to play every now and then, you won’t have the issue of being completely out of the loop after being away for a while. After around 50 to 100 hours, you will have seen most elements and corners of the game and have a somewhat decent end-game factory. The only upper limit to playtime is your creativity and wish to optimize further, or losing interest naturally and moving on.

As with many other sandbox-style games, the replayability can be as high or limited as your own expectations and plans. If you just enjoy experiencing a storyline once and then lose interest, there is little replay value. The story is linear and driven by your exploration efforts. There are no multiple endings or choice-matters-style branching decisions to make.

If you enjoy starting over in other biomes, on different difficulties, or with custom settings, you have a near unlimited replay value. While the world map is not procedurally generated (which means that all nodes, materials, secrets, and such will always be at the same place), you will probably never build the same factory twice or have the exact same gameplay experience.

To play Satisfactory in co-op multiplayer, one player of your group either has to host an online co-op session, which others can be invited to or join into.

For player-based hosting, one player has to create the session, including spawn location and difficulty or custom settings. Depending on the privacy setting, the host then may either invite friends using the in-game invite feature or the Steam friend list (when setting privacy to ‘Private’). Or friends are allowed to freely load into the hosted game over the Steam friend list or enter the Session ID (when using the ‘Friends only’ setting). In that case, the Session ID needs to be shared by the host.

Alternatively, a dedicated server can be used. But as usual, this requires some technical knowledge and time to set up and keep running.

Regardless of the chosen type of hosting, up to 3 other players may join in, forming a group of 4.

Depending on your co-op group members’ interests and strengths, it makes sense to assign different roles to each member. While you technically can do everything together, dividing tasks allows your group to progress and expand faster. Especially during your first hours, you need to invest quite some time into manual crafting to boost your progression, but this also requires you to possess all base materials needed while keeping up with your factory’s energy requirements.

Different roles to assign can include: Explorer and Scout (finding materials, fighting enemies), Resource Gatherer (getting biomass for energy production, keeping up with materials for manual crafting), Optimizer (pushing milestone tiers, advancing building tiers), Builder (planning out layouts and chains), and more. Depending on your groups’ size, you can divide roles more narrowly or broadly. Of course, if your interests overlap, you can also do some ‘job rotation’ and regularly swap responsibilities. This division prevents standing around one person who is doing all the building by themselves and feeling bored or redundant. If everyone knows exactly what to do and how they are contributing to your factories’ success, fun, teamwork, and a sense of accomplishment will skyrocket!

Satisfactory is one of those co-op games that feel great when your group’s communication, coordination, and planning work but may feel lacking and frustrating to some if it does not. Speak with your team about what tasks the game throws at you, vote on how to progress and divide tasks while involving and engaging everyone, and you have a recipe for success!

Conflicts may arise naturally. Whether you disagree over factory layouts, expansion plans, or roles, the open-world sandbox character is not easy to maneuver for every group. Topics such as inefficiency or different standards in terms of factory aesthetics might frustrate some players but can also present a great team-building opportunity. We do repeat ourselves, but: Satisfactory wants you to talk to each other and work hand-in-hand, or at least, side-by-side, to find compromises or just trust in the others’ planning and execution. Solving problems together, like sudden power outages and stopped machines, working under pressure, or helping each other out in clutch fights with wildlife while exploring far out, makes up for all the ‘ugly factories’ your co-op partner might have built.

And if everything fails (or rather, when...), just embrace the spaghetti conveyor belts clipping into the floors or insufficient production chains leaving your machines on idle. And if your groups’ Explorer set out too far into the high-level areas by themselves again (absolutely not an anecdote, who would do that?!), have a laugh and venture back together to recover all the dropped items as a team.

They have added lots of settings over the years. If you want to or need to use accessibility options, you can customize controls, use colorblindness settings, and adjust text sizes. The UI has a minimalistic and clear design and is easy to navigate once you familiarize yourself with it.

If the difficulty or complexity feels overwhelming, you can personalize your game session further by applying various different custom settings.

Satisfactory is one of the few games without a focus on combat or violence. There is no blood or gore; even tough fighting the wildlife in normal difficulty and above is almost always a necessity. Some creatures will attack you on sight, and you will have to defeat them to survive yourself. There are some spider-type enemies (large and small), but you may use an arachnophobia filter in the settings to ease this fear.

If environmental aspects and the destruction of nature, such as clearing woods to build factories, are unsettling to you, you may want to choose another game instead, as this is the main focus of Satisfactory, of course.

Other points that might trigger anxiety in some individuals are the very dark nights (there is a mod available for download to stop that day-night cycle) and large heights, as using a glider or jetpack becomes necessary later on.

We started playing Satisfactory in 2-player co-op in 2022, and since then we have barely ever encountered any technical issues, neither regarding hosting or joining our sessions nor connectivity issues or crashing. Coffee Stain Studios have polished the game immensely before the Version 1.0 launch in September 2024, graphically as well as technically. There are some mildly janky looking animations of the character models here and there, but those add more to the fun and lighthearted atmosphere than break any immersion. Many things have been fixed during the successful Early Access phase (like backwards-flowing items on conveyor belts), and the game is in a solid, stable state with working game mechanics, beautiful visuals, and an amazing soundtrack. 

In this section, as usual, we give a pro and con in the format of who should definately pick this game up and who might better leave it be or revisit the game later.

And this does conclude our review of Satisfactory in co-op. To summarize, it is a rewarding and fun game to play solo, but playing it in co-op multiplayer really brings it to life. If you enjoy a mix of planning, optimization, exploration, and problem-solving, Satisfactory is the game for your group of friends and family to play. It is a logical and creative outlet at the same time. If you are looking for a relaxed yet complex game to spend hours in together, it is worth checking out.

While Satisfactory in co-op is about building a factory, of course, it can be so much more. You can design your own little challenge modes, make building competitions, adventure together, or spend time by yourself working on your little assigned part of a bigger design. At the end of the day, you create something together that just works - even if you find out that your co-op partner(s) really just fully embrace chaos while abandoning all sense of organized building (which could speak for a low value on the conscientiousness scale in terms of personality, by the way, but who really cares about that if you had such great fun together).

We gave Satisfactory a rating of 4.6 out of 5.

4.6 / 5.0