FOUNDRY is a voxel-based first-person factory management simulator from Channel 3 Entertainment and Paradox Interactive. Read our review to learn what it did well, what it didn't do well, and whether it's worth buying.
FOUNDRY Review Overview
What is FOUNDRY?
FOUNDRY is a 3D first-person factory management simulator where you gather and exploit the myriad resources of an unnamed exoplanet. Tear down massive flora and megalithic structures in a voxel-based environment perfect for grid-based planning. Through careful refining, efficient construction, and well-planned logistics, the various biomes of this alien world will become the foundation of your dream factory.
FOUNDRY features:
⚫︎ Voxel-based world generation
⚫︎ Snappy gameplay with tight controls and easy-to-understand mechanics
⚫︎ Vibrant graphics that are easy on the graphics card
⚫︎ 2-4 player co-op online multiplayer
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about FOUNDRY's gameplay and story.
 Steam |
$29.99 |
FOUNDRY Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Great Factory Management Mechanics Easy to Pick Up |
Nothing More Than Blueprints Voxel-based Design is an Afterthought Lacking Polish |
FOUNDRY Overall Score - 64/100
FOUNDRY is by no means a bad game nor one that cannot get better in time. Unfortunately, it lacks the polish to be remarkable and the innovation to be more than satisfactory. As a matter of fact, it’s just a worse version of Satisfactory for the exact same price. There’s no reason to play this game while Satisfactory exists, even if it manages to shake off its Early Access shackles.
FOUNDRY Story - 5/10
FOUNDRY’s story technically exists, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it didn’t have one. This is a problem inherent with most factory management games because the gameplay is often the bigger focus, although a few have gotten away with not having a story by keeping their environmental storytelling on point. FOUNDRY isn’t such a game, with its robotic stylings and voxel-based world-generation being irrelevant to its narrative.
FOUNDRY Gameplay - 8/10
FOUNDRY’s gameplay is crisp, responsive, and fun as heck; all qualities a great factory management game should have. It also has a healthy amount of quality-of-life features that make the gameplay as smooth as it is user-friendly. My only gripe is that it does little to differentiate itself from Satisfactory gameplay-wise, making it come off as a worse earlier version of the latter.
FOUNDRY Visuals - 8/10
FOUNDRY’S aesthetics is a fun blend of vibrant, low-poly models and grimy industrialist designs. The physics of trees, rocks, and dirt crumbling also adds a "sandbox" feel to it that even Satisfactory doesn’t have with its futuristic sleekness. I just wish that the voxel-based world generation was more prominent, as it’s more of a novelty than an actual feature at the moment.
FOUNDRY Audio - 6/10
FOUNDRY’S audio is only barely bearable with its non-distinct factory and resource-gathering sounds and its admittedly mediocre voice acting. These stock-sounding SFX bites make up much of the game’s Early Access woes, so I expect it’ll be improved before long. As it is now, though, you can just keep this game muted to no consequence.
FOUNDRY Value for Money - 5/10
As it is now—and even when it’s fully released, I wager—FOUNDRY accomplishes little by way of standing out and innovating on the basic factory management formula. It executes said basics well and is 100% fun to play, but it really cannot compare to the genre’s forerunners in terms of quality AND uniqueness. You're better off buying a better superior game for the same price.
FOUNDRY Review (Early Access): Not “Satisfactory”
There’s no way to avoid the comparison so I’ll just get it out of the way before we continue with the rest of this review. Yes, FOUNDRY is rather similar to Satisfactory, which is another 3D first-person factory management simulator set on an alien planet. The similarities don’t end with the two games’ premises, of course, as a lot of the gameplay is pretty much the same as well.
Now, usually, this is where I’d highlight where the two games diverge, how FOUNDRY is actually its own game with its unique appeal and innovations to the formula. As you’ll come to see with each subsequent paragraph, however, that simply isn’t the case. Let’s dig a little deeper into this voxel-infused attempt at a factory game and see what makes it un-Satisfactory.
We’ll begin with its gameplay because this is where most factory games shine. FOUNDRY is a 3D factory management simulator with an emphasis on logistics and automation. Exploration isn’t a pillar of its gameplay at this stage, although the wilderness of the planet the game is set in does vary with its many biomes and voxel-based terrain.
The gist of FOUNDRY’s gameplay loop involves finding resources, refining said resources, and turning refined materials into machinery to be integrated back into the system for maximum efficiency.
Right off the bat, it’s a robust gameplay loop that was executed well. There are hardly any gaps within the loop and you can pretty much plan your entire factory from the ground up without gathering a single stone. It’s rigid, tightly knit, and effective for the basics of factory management.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to say how much of that tight gameplay can be attributed to FOUNDRY when Satisfactory defined these mechanics years before. That’s not to say that FOUNDRY copied Satisfactory, of course, as convergent game design happens all the time. After all, there are only so many ways one can design a factory management system before a few commonalities pop up.
What disappoints me about FOUNDRY isn’t that it’s like Satisfactory, it’s that it did nothing to add to the formula that Satisfactory created. I’d say that Satisfactory walked so FOUNDRY can run, but FOUNDRY isn’t running. If anything, it’s lagging behind the example despite being the new kid on the block
For example, FOUNDRY’s conveyor belt logistics system, while great, isn’t any better than Satisfactory’s. I can even argue that it’s much worse because unlocking splitters, mergers, and round-robin options takes much longer in FOUNDRY. The same could also be said about FOUNDRY’s energy system, which is a slimmed-down, but not necessarily improved, version of Satisfactory’s.
The input systems for machines are a whole other story though because rather than being a slightly worse version of whatever Satisfactory has, it’s an outright downgrade that—for the life of me—I could not justify existing. It’s not clunky enough to ruin the smoothness of the loop, but it’s the only straight downgrade I’ve seen so far.
Instead of being built into every machine, you need to build, program, and finagle with input and output doohickeys for your materials to be processed. It’s like it’s evolving…but backward.
Lack of originality aside, the gameplay is objectively well-designed, as I stated earlier. Every mechanic is easy to grasp and the tutorial is informative without being too handholdy. I was able to apply all my knowledge from Satisfactory without much trouble, meaning a veteran factory sim player could pick this up in mere seconds while a complete greenhorn could do the same in minutes.
Visually, the game separates itself from its oft-compared peer by being far more vibrant and cartoony. Combined with its voxel-based world generation, this game looks like a factory made in Minecraft. That’s the extent of FOUNDRY’s use of voxels, however, and it’s not a very outstanding extent at that.
The landscape, is very flat, which ironically makes it look like it wasn’t made of voxels. The machinery isn’t very cuboidal either, creating this visual tug-of-war between the deliberate stylization of the landscape and the user practicality of interactable machines. I’m not a fan of this balancing act, as it comes off as indecision rather than a tasteful combination of the two ideas.
Audio-wise, FOUNDRY managed to disappoint a little. While nothing about its audio is outwardly atrocious, the stock-sounding SFX and mediocre voice-acting make this game feel like a cheap knockoff. There’s no variety among the machine sounds and a full factory just sounds like the same sound bite being repeated ad nauseam.
I don’t expect this game would leave Early Access with this quality of audio, but it’s messing up the game’s quality now.
Overall, that’s what FOUNDRY is, or rather, what it isn’t. FOUNDRY isn’t Satisfactory despite their similarities. While the latter is soaring across the genre as one of its best titles, the former is just a lesser version with functioning parts but no soul to speak of.
Frankly, I wouldn’t hold my breath for this game because there’s just no need. Satisfactory is also out in Early Access and will be launching its 1.0 version in 2024. It won’t have FOUNDRY’s voxel stylings but it’ll be a thousand times better in every other way.
Pros of FOUNDRY
| Things FOUNDRY Got Right |
|---|
|
Great Factory Management Mechanics Easy to Pick Up |
Great Factory Management Mechanics
Whether it did so through its own merit or not, FOUNDRY’s factory management gameplay is top-notch. It captures the satisfaction of laying out a bevy of conveyor belts well and the snap-to-grid construction keeps things in line (literally).
The research progression is appropriately paced and the logistical tools you’re given are ample enough for a proper factory. These are all basics for the 3D first-person factory simulator as far as mechanics are concerned, but you’d be surprised how often games get this wrong.
Easy to Pick Up
This is a good consequence of the game’s tight gameplay loop and robust mechanics but, yes, FOUNDRY’s gameplay is very easy to pick up and even easier to experiment with. I’d even go as much as to say that it’s easier than Satisfactory’s, but whether or not that’s a good thing is up to you.
In addition to the simplicity of the game’s premise, the legion of quality-of-life features like copy-paste building, mass structure deletion, nested customization controls, and grid-based construction make FOUNDRY the perfect choice for beginners to the genre.
Cons of FOUNDRY
| Things That FOUNDRY Can Improve |
|---|
|
Nothing More Than Blueprints Voxel-based Design is an Afterthought Lacking Polish |
Nothing More Than Blueprints
I say that because this game is all structure and no decor. It has great mechanics that were executed well—to a fine point, even—but it has all the charm and soul of a black-and-white floor plan. It’s missing the je ne sais quoi of a passion project and feels more like a proof of concept than an actual game.
That’s not to say that it’s unfun, mind you, just that it’s more functionality than form, which may be a contributing factor to its lack of innovation and subsequent inferiority to Satisfactory.
Voxel-based Design is an Afterthought
What bothered me the most about the game’s implementation of its voxel-based world generation is the disparity between how often that feature is highlighted and how it’s actually represented in-game.
The world is made of cubes, yes, but the flat landscape and distinctly non-cuboidal shape of the rocks, plants, and machinery take away from what is supposed to be one of the game’s major features. It just seems like an afterthought of a feature, one that wouldn’t affect the game in the slightest if it were removed or replaced with normal terrain generation.
I think that the developers should either lean into the idea harder to give the game a more distinct visual style and well-defined world generation feature or just abandon it altogether and go for something more traditional, if only for its ease of implementation.
Lacking Polish
There are also a bunch of miscellaneous nicks and chips that the game has in its finish that could be buffed out in time. The UI is acceptable, although it’s unusually blocky and not really that flattering for the game’s cartoony aesthetics. It’s also a tad clunky for a couple of menus in particular (player and machine inventories) and the default bindings just don’t make sense.
FOUNDRY just lacks the general polish of a game that’s been scrutinized to all heck by its community. This will change in time, the game is in Early Access after all. But as it is now, it definitely could use a few updates before it can kick off fully.
Is FOUNDRY Worth It?
Honestly, Just Buy Satisfactory
FOUNDRY is a good game—a great game, some might even say—and it will only get better as time goes on. Although lacking in unique merits, it’s by no means unplayable and I can see some people genuinely having fun with it. The only reason it’s not worth its $30 price is that Satisfactory is much better and is asking for the same amount.
If FOUNDRY were any cheaper—say $15-20 or so—I can justify purchasing it over Satisfactory. As it stands, though, it’s just comes off as a cheap knock-off that’s actually not any cheaper than the superior alternative.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$29.99 |
FOUNDRY FAQ
What If I Already Bought FOUNDRY on Itch.io?
According to the game’s developers, players who have already purchased FOUNDRY from Itch.io can expect a Steam key to be sent out to them before the release.
The key will enable Itch players to redeem FOUNDRY Founder's Edition on the day of Early Access release, May 2nd.
Will FOUNDRY Be Available to Other Platforms in the Future?
The game’s developers only planned FOUNDRY to be available on Steam, but they are open to the idea of porting the game to other platforms and will update the community should they ever choose to do so.
What Languages Does FOUNDRY Support?
The game is available in the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish (both Spain and LATAM), Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.
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FOUNDRY Product Information
 |
|
| Title | FOUNDRY |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 2, 2024 |
| Developer | Channel 3 Entertainment |
| Publisher | Paradox Interactive |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Adventure, Simulation |
| Number of Players | 2-4 (Online Co-op Multiplayer) |
| ESRB Rating | PEGI 3 |
| Official Website | FOUNDRY Website |
