Final Factory is a space-age factory management simulator from Never Games Limited where you build massive factories in the cold and hostile vastness of space. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Final Factory Review Overview
What is Final Factory?
Final Factory is a factory management simulator set in the vast reaches of deep space. Gather raw materials from wayward asteroids and build up your fleet of drones and fighters to claim territory for your factories. Automate and fabricate your way into the secrets of the universe through careful planning and efficient logistics. Build spanning production chains and establish your dominance across the stars.
Final Factory features:
⚫︎ Fun and simple factory management mechanics
⚫︎ Satisfying production and logistical chains
⚫︎ Fast-paced deep space drone combat
⚫︎ Mesmerizing 2.5 D visuals
⚫︎ Procedurally-generated map with fun exploration mechanics
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Final Factory's gameplay and story.
 Steam |
$23.99 |
Final Factory Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Satisfying Automation Mechanics Great Quality-of-Life |
UI Scaling and Design Aren’t Great Takes a While to Take Off |
Final Factory Overall Score - 70/100
While it proved itself to be a promising game, Final Factory is far from being a final product. The parts are there and they function well enough. Unfortunately, it’s not fully put together yet and some assembly might still be required, especially for its UI. It’s a ways away from its full potential, but hey, that’s Early Access for you.
Final Factory Story - 6/10
Factory sims aren’t known for their expansive and detailed narratives and Final Factory is no exception. Most automation games try to set the scene, at least, and Final Factory’s premise and universe aren’t the most fleshed out. You don’t really have an impetus to piece things together. You sort of just find things and make use of them without a second thought.
Final Factory Gameplay - 8/10
Final Factory’s gameplay is quite robust in its construction and implementation. I enjoy the smoothness of its automation mechanics and how easily things just connect. It’s complex enough to be interesting but I wouldn’t need to watch a guide to enjoy it like I would with Factorio. I particularly appreciate the game’s copy-paste feature, which makes building production lines an absolute breeze.
Final Factory Visuals - 8/10
Final Factory has 2.5D visuals, which isn’t too common for the factory simulation genre. The chunky design of your ships and the geometric look of the planets and asteroids remind me of a Popcap game from the early 2000s. The parallax between your ship in the foreground and the planets in the background also looks great. Overall, it’s a unique look, even if sci-fi aesthetics are a dime-a-dozen among factory sims.
Final Factory Audio - 6/10
Final Factory’s audio is an odd case of mismatched genres, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s bad. It sounds too much like the Sims 4 soundtrack to fully invest me in the game’s sci-fi themes, and far too gentle at times to convey the seriousness of battle.
Final Factory Value for Money - 7/10
Although Final Factory’s $24 price is on par with most other factory management and automation games, I would still say that it’s on the steeper side considering that it’s an early-access game. I’m sure that the developers will eventually grow the game to better suit its price tag, but at the moment, with its so-so story and odd choice of audio, the game is only barely worth that much.
Final Factory Review: Additional Assembly Required
I’ll preface this review by declaring my adoration for factory management simulators. I’ve come to enjoy the genre immensely for titles like Factorio and Big Pharma, but newer entries like Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program have also staked their claim in my heart. And, despite having some of the most defined and robust mechanics characterizing the genre, breakthroughs in gameplay and graphics keep popping up every year.
I would say that Final Factory is one such genre-defying title but that would be a lie. Now, hold your booster rockets, I mean that as a compliment. You’ll see throughout this review that, while not unique, Final Factory is a case of not fixing what isn’t broken.
We’ll begin our breakdown of Final Factory as we often do with these kinds of games by discussing its gameplay mechanics. Final Factory plays like the archetypal factory management simulator. You gather raw materials, move them to other machines to get processed, tackle logistical problems, rinse, and repeat.
It’s not a complex system in theory and practice, nor does it have to be one in order to be fun. Final Factory understands this, so it doesn’t hit you with anything too fancy right out of the gate. It kind of works to its detriment—we’ll get to how and why later—but it also keeps the game tight and easy to understand.
Things just connect to each other, and there’s usually no need to get caught up in any fancy logistics in the early game, which is nice because it allows you to focus on the game’s other aspects: exploration and combat. Exploration in this game pairs well with its combat because things will literally just crawl out of the cosmic fog to attack you sometimes. It’s only a matter of moving to places and seeing what’s there, but the fact that the map is both procedurally-generated and effectively infinite is a nice touch for the intrepid among you.
It’s also a bit of a divergence from standard factory sim game design, which usually prioritizes the establishment of a base over rampant exploration. The fact that you’re in deep space kind of reinforces the idea that you’ve got to keep moving, as these asteroids and planets are finite but your enemies are not. Speaking of enemies, let’s get to the game’s combat system.
Like its factory layer, combat in this game is easy to understand but leaves room for mastery and experimentation down the line. You’re basically playing a game of Asteroids, which is, for the younger among you, a simple top-down shooter from the arcade era of gaming. You find targets and shoot at them, but you’re also accompanied by a swarm of drones that can shoot and move independently from you.
These drones need to be built individually but are reliable and easy to come by. You have a maximum number of drones you can have with you at a time, as denoted by your Fleet Size, and having a certain number of them allows you to activate certain abilities. Combat isn’t the only thing drones are good for either, as logistics drones, both small and large, serve as the lifeblood of your factory’s beating heart.
Creating an assembly line in Final Factory is both satisfying and easy with its quality-of-life features, with the copy-paste and blueprint features being my favorites by far. These let you copy and paste entire portions of your factories to build or rebuild elsewhere, which saves you an unimaginable amount of time, especially for larger projects. The blueprint feature is a godsend because it lets you save a configuration of machines, conveyors, and settings as a preset template that you can use later. You can even share these with the game’s online community if you want to.
Visually, Final Factory is a bit of an oddity among its factory sim brethren. Instead of being purely 2D or 3D, it’s a 2.5D environment, meaning it has 3D assets but only allows the player to move in a 2D plane. This looks absolutely trippy in space, especially when you have a planet, asteroid, or ancient structure in the background. I appreciate the style, however, and the chunky early 2000s-adjacent design for the machinery and ships helps sell the often visually tiring fittings of sci-fi aesthetics.
Audio-wise, this game is a mixed bag…literally. It’s a weird combination of feel-good Sims 4 music and dreary space ambiance that doesn’t work as well as the developers may have intended. I don’t think it takes away from the experience, but it certainly leaves me a little befuddled, which is a darn shame. The music itself is very well-made, it’s just that it wasn’t made for this kind of game or these kinds of cosmic escapades.
And that’s Final Factory in a nutshell. It executes the basics of its genre well enough to not warrant anything too fancy, while still providing a fun, if not a little incomplete, experience. I’m aware that this game is in Early Access so we can expect more spit and polish to round out its rough edges soon enough. As it is now, however, it has a ways to go before it becomes a final product.
Pros of Final Factory
| Things Final Factory Got Right |
|---|
|
Satisfying Automation Mechanics Great Quality-of-Life |
Satisfying Automation Mechanics
As I mentioned earlier, this game's factory mechanics are its greatest strength, easily outpacing the game’s exploration and combat in terms of satisfying gameplay. Everything clicks well together and, for the most part, it’s easy to intuit how one can process materials through sheer design language alone.
The animations are smooth and the game communicates what your factory needs well by way of flashing symbols and simple tooltips. It’s basically an idiot-proof game that even the most novice factory foreman can work with.
Great Quality-of-Life
Final Factory’s factory simulation layer has many quality-of-life features that make an already intuitive building system easier to work with. Apart from the aforementioned copy-paste and blueprint system, the game also has an alarm for when any part of your factory is being attacked. Not only that, clicking the flashing alarm will instantly move the camera to where you’re being attacked, saving you precious time and allowing you to respond in haste.
This is a godsend in a game where you have different factory outposts spread across numerous asteroids. There’s also the Cut Tool, which allows you to relocate and reorient highlighted parts of your factories without having to go through the tedium of rebuilding piece by piece. Together, these features elevate the game’s factory management from a simple task to a satisfying endeavor.
Cons of Final Factory
| Things That Final Factory Can Improve |
|---|
|
UI Scaling and Design Aren’t Great Takes a While to Take Off |
UI Scaling and Design Aren’t Great
"Not Great" is underselling it a little bit—this game’s UI scaling and design are downright atrocious. Even on the highest UI scaling the game allows, I can barely read what the tabs and mission pop-ups are saying, and that’s saying a lot considering their bright blue backgrounds and stark white letters.
More to that point, the UI itself looks cheap, which makes me question whether or not I actually want to see it. The typeface makes this game’s menus look like band ads on a flyer instead of a sci-fi UI that lets you build ships. The images on the build menus are also blurry as heck, which cheapens the experience further.
It’s a common criticism for Early Access titles and I am aware that these will most likely be swapped out for proper, theme-appropriate designs before long. I’m judging the game for what it is now, which is incomplete and not that great-looking.
Takes a While to Take Off
Rocket puns aside, this game does take a significant amount of time to get interesting. Barring the tutorial, the start of each game feels like a slog through mostly empty space. Granted, that’s usually how factory sims go, as you lack the infrastructure to just truck along while your automated factory makes everything. Still, the early game feels more like an idler, where you just collect and process raw material yourself while running through the cosmic fog and fighting the occasional enemy.
Research, in particular, is such a chore in the early game. You can automate it, sure, but research drones automatically die after a certain research threshold and research stations are expensive, so you’re ping-ponging across asteroids much more than you’d ever have to in the late game.
Is Final Factory Worth It?
It Barely Is Now, But It Could Be in The Future
It’s difficult to gauge if Final Factory is worth its weight in resources at the moment. On one hand, the game is fun enough to play and gets good mileage with its great quality of life and robust mechanics. On the other hand, it is very clearly not a finished product, with its music, UI, and general bugginess still posing a potential damper on its worth.
I’d say it’s worth $24 at the moment, but only just. I’m sure that the game would grow into its asking price as new updates roll in, but you may want to have a closer look at this game before you purchase it.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$23.99 |
Final Factory FAQ
How Do I Copy and Paste Structures in Final Factory?
To copy a structure in Final Factory, you must press Ctrl + C and highlight the area you want to copy. You can tell a structure is highlighted if it is outlined in yellow.
To paste a copied structure, you must press Ctrl + V, which will paste the copied structure as an unbuilt blueprint. You can still move and rotate the structure in this state and can confirm placement by left-clicking.
Why Are My Drones Not Following Me in Final Factory?
You may have set your drones to standby or wait in a different location by accident. To remedy this, you may toggle your drones to follow you wherever you go by pressing the "G" key on your keyboard.
How Do I Make Efficient Factories in Final Factory?
You may keep the following efficiency tips and tricks when building your factories:
Avoid Overheating
Factory production is cut in half if one or more machines overheat. Make sure you have ample Heat Sinks or Heat-absorbing Ancient Artifacts attached to your factory at all times. You may check your factory’s heat levels by mousing over it.
Don’t Overflow Your Logistical Lines
Sometimes, your factories are taking in more materials than they actually need. To avoid wasting time and resources, you can do some basic math and figure out your resource overflow for each major portion of your factory.
From there, you can branch off to form another production line if the overflow allows or create a stockpile of resources you can take from later.
Build Wisely
Always build your factories with logistics in mind. If your factory only requires one particular resource, it’s prudent to build it next to an asteroid that has that resource and a mining rig that can harvest it.
Otherwise, it’s best to build a factory within close proximity of asteroids containing all required resource inputs. It’s also a good idea to face the logistics hub toward the asteroid that has the resources you need if possible.
If there is no space left between the asteroids, it’s a good idea to build a centralized resource hub for all your material needs.
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Final Factory Product Information
 |
|
| Title | FINAL FACTORY |
|---|---|
| Release Date | April 10, 2024 |
| Developer | Never Games Limited |
| Publisher | Never Games Limited |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Simulation |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Final Factory Website |
