The Dyson Sphere program is a must-have for fans of factory games

While I keep changing my mind about how I personally enjoy the Dyson Sphere program, there is one thing I can say without hesitation: it is awesome, bloody work. While it’s new to Early Access, it already has an extremely broad feature set, and the kind of extremely ambitious premise that you would chuckle like a pipe dream, if it weren’t already implemented.

This premise? Create an interstellar industrial empire, on a scale where you can capture entire stars and put them to work, like those poor dinosaurs the Flintstones would trap in their kitchen appliances. But large galactic oaks from small acorns grow, and this absurd job begins with a single mech, walking on a 3D spherical planet.

My first impression was this: here is the big guy from Total Annihilation, and he invaded a game of Spore, in order to harass silly worms (I guess Planetary Annihilation would have been the most fitting comparison at that time, but I had never really played it much, so Total Annihilation vs Spore).

True to TA’s form, I had my evil mech stomp on, disintegrating rocks and trees with his hands, and building mines and stuff with the accumulated matter. Then the game started convincing me towards conveyor belts, and producing arbitrary cubes that served as research points, and it hit me immediately: it was a Factorio-’em-up.

Well, that’s offhand on my part. It’s a bit dated now to say that a factory game should automatically be like Factorio. But only because Factorio has had enough success to spawn a whole subgenre of factory games that more or less set him apart. DSP borrows heavily from several – notably Daddy F himself, but also the generally accepted finalist of the genre Satisfactory and the more divergent Astroneer.

There are more esoteric influences that are still clear – the semi-automated trade routes of the Anno series, for example, and of course Total / Planetary Annihilation, with the big geezer robot. Hell, Spore isn’t even as ridiculous as a comparison, given how your progression in the game sees your industrial operation increasing smoothly through orders of magnitude of scale, from planetary to interplanetary to interstellar. .

My point is if you understand the basics of Factorio, you already have the basics of DSP. And if you like the idea that all of the other games mentioned have the option of playing together and having babies, chances are you’ll like it. This is by no means a purse derived from looted mechanics, from the spirit – and even if it did, there’s enough originality with the sheer daring of DSP’s reach to deserve it. a pass for a certain time.

But no: to be fair to the Youthcat Studio developers (for real, I love the name), their game does a lot of its own innovations on top of the things it borrows, and combines the strengths of many of its inspirations. . Stackable and multi-layer conveyor belt systems, for example, are both intuitive to use and far less nightmarish than the hell of Factorio’s 2D spaghetti. Or at least it’s a different nightmare, a little more fun.

It’s also fair to say that Youthcat also made some non-innovations. The inability to link keys, for example, is a bit odd, as is the frustrating one-way system imposed on rotating building footprints. If I’m being honest the whole UI was riddled with little irritations for me, and I’d be happy to see it revised. But hey – these are exactly the kind of issues that I tend to expect in an Early Access release, and so it’s hard to build on them.

As for the more fundamental issues, I guess I felt the DSP tech tree seemed a bit dry, overall. Obviously, I felt very motivated to come up with mega-interstellar and megascal endgame stuff, but it wasn’t an immediate motivation. For a new player in particular, DSP keeps you around the planet for an almost frustrating time. And while you wait to emerge from the chrysalis of your initial gravity and take flight as a majestic space butterfly, things can start to feel a bit rotten. The tech tree is starting to look like a series of checkboxes, and – maybe because I’ve been a little exhausted recently on Factorio – creating production lines for research-cube-things has looked like it is. ‘a chore sooner than I wanted.

But it’s probably worth stressing again: I’m a bit exhausted with Factorio right now. Because this game takes so many clues in terms of rhythm and core systems, it’s no wonder my judgment on this one was tinted with a bit of spinoff. If you’re currently hungry for factory fun and want it at a level that allows you to play with the stars themselves as fuel, I’d be hard pressed to find a reason why you shouldn’t try this game.