The RPS Advent Calendar 2024 is here and each day reveals one of their favorite games of the year leading up to the Game of the Year on the 24th.
The first game revealed behind the first door of the calendar is Factorio: Space Age.
Factorio: Space Age introduces new planets, some with unique challenges, and forces players to abandon familiar methods and start anew with each new frontier.
Vulcanus, a lava planet, has no iron or copper deposits, instead mining for ores involved manually hitting rocks and piping lava directly into foundries to produce iron and copper by the beltload while keeping builds compact to avoid nigh-invulnerable worms called Demolishers.
Gleba, with its spongy landscape, requires harvesting fruits and combining them in organic machines that run on nutrients like organism. If the production line backs up the entire line will spoil into nothingness.
Fulgora, an oil-filled ocean planet with lightning storms, requires the player to break apart high-tech ruins and salvage processor chips and modular frames, and work their way down the tech tree.
Factorio: Space Age has a focus on the player’s quality of life that is unmatched in any other game and feels like playing several different factory games linked together.
It’s been a phenomenal year for factory games, perhaps the best ever with Satisfactory reaching its full release and Shapez 2 being released.
Factorio: Space Age is still the king of the genre.
Anyone interested in Factorio: Space Age may want to set aside the entire year to delve into the many intricacies and challenges on the new frontier.