There are also Minecraft vibes to the lonely struggle for survival and the incredible satisfaction of successfully designing and building something increasingly complex at your own pace. Playing in first-person makes factory design tougher in sometimes frustrating ways, but that’s eclipsed by the joy of exploring alien worlds teeming with exotic wildlife. What I was unprepared for is just how beautiful the game is. It’s a puzzle with constantly shifting goals that makes you repeatedly realize what you just built was stupid and inefficient because you’ve already thought of a better way to do it.īilling it as a 3D Factorio is partially accurate, but that description sells it short. Finding what you need, mining or extracting it, and combining resources to make new things depends upon exploration and the construction of smelters and manufacturing units linked by pipes, conveyor belts, and power lines. You're tasked with building a gigantic machine to suck the resources out for a soulless corporation. Set in a vague, dystopian future, Satisfactory drops you on an alien planet.

Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day. com and our print magazine (if you'd like). Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). Updated December 2021: Added Satisfactory, Jurassic World Evolution 2, and Timberborn. As the kids have grown, I’ve found myself with a little more time to scratch that management and building itch, and these are the games that have sucked me back in.Ī note for potential players: While there are often console versions, you tend to get better controls and greater depth if you play on PC. These games are the perfect foil to multiplayer madness, offering a table of absorbing escapism for one. I built impregnable castles in Stronghold, and I sank days into Game Dev Story-a game about making games.

My villainous lairs in Dungeon Keeper 2 and Evil Genius were beyond compare. I ran a studio in The Movies, managed a menagerie in Zoo Tycoon, and constructed the pyramids in Pharaoh. I spent countless days building in Sim Tower, SimCity, and Theme Park. Before kids and other responsibilities, when I regularly gamed into the wee hours, playing management sims was one of my favorite things to do.

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