At first, it’s a single drill, rumbling away cheerfully in an alien world of sunny hills and wildflowers. Then, your first conveyor belt, carrying ore from mines to the smelter. The factory grows up around you slowly and unobtrusively: it’s easy to lose sight of the whole while you’re busy untangling bottlenecks and reorganising your production lines in order to create more advanced components. But after a while, you think to look up and around rather than down from your observation tower, and realise that, at some point, the factory has become everything you can see.
So go the opening hours of Satisfactory, one of the most successful members of an intricate species of management game that has quietly shot to popularity over the past few years. Ranging in scale from molecular reactors to extractors bigger than stars, factory sims are hypnotic celebrations of automation, allowing a single player to build up an industrial empire that can ultimately be left to operate itself. But it’s once again worth looking up, from the mesmerising loop and around yourself, and considering these games’ complicated relationship both with the social and environmental impacts of their real-life equivalents, and with videogames’ own tendency towards optimisation.
Denne historien er fra April 2022-utgaven av Edge.
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Denne historien er fra April 2022-utgaven av Edge.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
BONAPARTE: A MECHANIZED REVOLUTION
No sooner have we stepped into the boots of royal guard Bonaparte than we’re faced with a life-altering decision.
TOWERS OF AGHASBA
Watch Towers Of Aghasba in action and it feels vast. Given your activities range from deepwater dives to climbing up cliffs or lumbering beasts, and from nurturing plants or building settlements to pinging arrows at the undead, it’s hard to get a bead on the game’s limits.
THE STONE OF MADNESS
The makers of Blasphemous return to religion and insanity
Vampire Survivors
As Vampire Survivors expanded through early access and then its two first DLCs, it gained arenas, characters and weapons, but the formula remained unchanged.
Devil May Cry
The Resident Evil 4 that never was, and the Soulslike precursor we never saw coming
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
With Dragon Age: The Veilguard, BioWare has made a deeply self-conscious game, visibly inspired by some of the best-loved ideas from Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
SKATE STORY
Hades is a halfpipe
SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION VII
Firaxis rethinks who makes history, and how it unfolds
FINAL FANTASY VII: REBIRTH
Remaking an iconic game was daunting enough then the developers faced the difficult second entry
THUNDER LOTUS
How Spirit farer's developer tripled in size without tearing itself apart