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Satisfactory – the countryside won’t stay this pretty for long (Coffee Stain Publishing) Running a giant factory on an alien planet might not sound like the most exciting idea but the console version of Satisfactory is one of the best video games of the year. There’s something unsettling about the way some multinational corporations call the people that work for them anything other than employees. Starbucks calling its workers ‘partners’ is almost forgivable next to Amazon referring to its staff as ‘Amazonians’, or Swedish online loan business Klarna’s mildly emetic ‘Klarnauts’. Like any systematised attempt at cosiness, by an organisation whose sole aim is generating shareholder value at any cost, it has a dystopian inverse effect. Satisfactory’s faceless corporate, FICSIT Inc. (slogan: Short term solutions to long term problems) calls you, their employee, a ‘pioneer’. It’s at least slightly fitting, because they’ve blasted you across the galaxy to a distant, apparently uninhabited planet. There your job is to mine it for resources, ruthlessly extracting everything you can from its ecosystem. Although it works in up to four-player co-op, in single-player the only back-up that FICSIT provides is ADA, your default AI assistant. Her tech-neutral female voice delivers sarcastic, GLaDOS-style bon mots as you gradually extend your reach across the continent on which your malfunctioning drop pod crash landed. Like a 4K Minecraft, your first faltering attempts at resource gathering involve scooping up bushes and loose wood, and chipping away at mineral deposits with a handheld chisel, all from a first person perspective. An early priority is construction of your hub, which contains storage chests, along with a workbench that lets you craft useful materials from the raw resources you collect. You’ll also need to build a mini laboratory to start researching items across a set of tech trees, leading to all sorts of useful innovations, from explosives to expanded inventory and tool slots to modes of transport. Your time on the poetically named planet Massage-2(A-B)b is filled with discoveries, the first of which is that while there are easily accessible chunks of iron, copper, coal and more on the surface, you can also locate buried seams of each mineral. Placing an auto-miner on one of those offers an effectively limitless supply, provided it has electrical power and a storage unit to collect its output. Initially, that power is supplied by biomass burners, into which you shovel grass clippings, wood, and dead animals, but they’re consumed quickly, so you’ll regularly find your mining operations lying dormant when you return after protracted exploration. To fix that problem you can use your workbench to compact nature’s detritus into solid biomass logs, which last longer and take up less inventory space. Suffice to say, that’s the very thinnest end of a giant wedge. In power generation terms alone, you’ll soon progress from biomass to coal-fired turbines, before stumbling across uranium deposits. They initially just irradiate you, but by researching and manufacturing the right protection you’ll eventually come to rely on nuclear power rather than setting fire to loose leaves. There’s a similarly dramatic evolution for every system you use. That starts with mechanising production. While early requirements might specify five or 10 of a particular machined object, you’ll soon enough need hundreds, then thousands, and on up the scale. You’ll also need to combine different resources and products to get what you need. For example, to assemble a modular frame – a common component for many objects – you’ll need to mine iron ore, smelt it into purified ingots, machine those separately into sheets and rods to then process into screws, before synthesising a combination of those into the modular frames you need. You can do all that at your workbench, but it takes ages and doesn’t scale, so you begin by building simple production lines. When you start needing to combine their outputs, you can build conveyer belts linked to mechanised assemblers, whose output then gets carried to the next stage. It rapidly leads to expanding networks of miners, smelters, processing units and storage, all linked by a spaghetti junction of conveyers. Make robots to make robots to make more robots (Coffee Stain Publishing) Since Massage-2(A-B)b’s landmass is absolutely enormous, you’ll soon find yourself building extraction operations in its far flung corners. That process comes with its fair share of problems, one is the region’s fauna – not all of which is friendly. You begin the game with a taser style Xeno-Zapper that’s nowhere near capable of dispatching some of the larger, more aggressive beasts that attack you. It’s only fair to warn arachnophobes that some of those are huge, very fast-moving poisonous spiders. It’s possible to unlock projectile weapons of various types, none of which we found particularly useful, although the melee orientated Xeno-Basher proves quite effective. There aren’t too many animal varieties to encounter, but the flora has a far greater range, the biomes you find as you explore feeling both utterly alien and profoundly different from one another. The land itself is equally varied. The flat steppe where you make initial planetfall gives way to huge waterfalls in one direction, endless cliffs in another, and lush purple-hewn foliage in a third. There are deep canyons, lakes, lush forests, misty lowlands, and a wide rocky desert, along with beaches and mountainous regions. Getting around on foot, even once you’ve unlocked the running speed-enhancing blade runners is a job in itself. First person exploration is very compelling (Coffee Stain Publishing) You’ll also find your actions permanently altering the landscape. It may initially seem limitlessly vast, but your space elevator, factories belching smoke, lengthy conveyers from distant mineral deposits, networks of concrete ramps, and eventually bridges, railways, and vehicle-based distribution networks mean that after a while the untouched portions of its natural world start to recede. An early trophy is ‘Heal this, nature!’ and with good reason. Satisfactory entered early access more than six years ago, and it shows. The mind-bending complexity of its processes is layered in gradually over the course of literally hundreds of hours of play, and the interface uses every single button on the controller, some with different actions for long and short presses. You quickly get used to it, but it’s just as well each new system arrives after you’ve made yourself at ease with earlier ones. It does have a problem with pop-in though. Despite a massive draw distance, with nature and industry outlined against its glorious looking, constantly changing skies, you’ll find things relatively nearby suddenly winking into view when you’re only a few metres away. Shrubbery, giant mushrooms, trees, rock formations, and even predators will only pop into existence as you get close. It’s especially evident in larger caves and when you take to the skies, and it never stops being distracting. Don’t let that put you off though. The gameplay itself is savagely addictive. It’s like a hybrid of Subnautica’s fascinating first person exploration and base building, with Factorio’s spectacularly involved resource processing and construction. It slowly shifts from being about survival to manufacturing, and then architecture, the layout of your factories proving to be at least as important as what you feed into them. Orderly workflows may not sound exciting, but after 90 hours of progressively more efficient resource production and research, it becomes utterly captivating. Satisfactory’s scale and depth make it more of a temporary lifestyle than a game. Its growing interconnected rat’s nest of investigation, production, and research mean you’re always doing several things at once, making it hard to go to bed when your head’s so full of vital information about what’s about to come to fruition and what you need to do next – the variety of tasks and continual sense of progression just never letting go. Satisfactory is a uniquely wonderful experience, and if any of the above sounds appealing this is a practically essential purchase. Satisfactory PS5 review summary In Short: A massive and gloriously complex exploration, resource management, and factory-building extravaganza that takes hundreds of hours to unlock all its layers of possibilities. Pros: Great task diversity, that blends investigating its landmass with exploiting its resources efficiently. Wonderfully bleak sense of humour, vast scale, and sky high production values. Cons: Pop-in remains an issue throughout, and for those who don’t have unlimited time this might be a lot to take on. Score: 9/10 Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: £32.99Publisher: Coffee Stain PublishingDeveloper: Coffee Stain StudiosRelease Date: 4th November 2025Age Rating: 7 Defiling nature has never been so much fun (Coffee Stain Publishing) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. 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