I’ve played all three games and for me factorio is easily the best.
Designing big factories in Satisfactory feels awkward - it’s very hard to refactor and redesign because the buildings are so big and you need to build them one by one. The engineer in me is always vaguely dissatisfied with what I make in satisfactory. Satisfactory’s world is beautiful to explore - but that makes it a different sort of game.
And shapez was ok, but it lacks factorio’s loop. In factorio you build things out of what you mine and construct. Shapez needs its artificial level structure to motivate you to do anything - and I find that much less satisfying because it saps my intrinsic motivation. Factorio feels grounded in the world, whereas shapez feels like a puzzle game with almost no constraints.
The factorio modding scene is also incredible. Their are so many alternate ways to play factorio - complete with way deeper tech trees, or a base that teleports between planets every 10 minutes, Seaworld - where you start on a tiny island with nothing but ocean in every direction. And as others have mentioned, the game is rock solid. Multiplayer is an absolute blast.
That was my experience with Satisfactory as well. Factorio's greatest gameplay achievement is taking away mundane things once you've mastered them to the point of mind-numbing repetition. It's a sliding window, whereas Satisfactory just keeps piling on more layers of complexity without really abstracting anything away, save only for the running around with a chainsaw to keep your generators running.
Designing big factories in Satisfactory feels awkward - it’s very hard to refactor and redesign because the buildings are so big and you need to build them one by one. The engineer in me is always vaguely dissatisfied with what I make in satisfactory. Satisfactory’s world is beautiful to explore - but that makes it a different sort of game.
And shapez was ok, but it lacks factorio’s loop. In factorio you build things out of what you mine and construct. Shapez needs its artificial level structure to motivate you to do anything - and I find that much less satisfying because it saps my intrinsic motivation. Factorio feels grounded in the world, whereas shapez feels like a puzzle game with almost no constraints.
The factorio modding scene is also incredible. Their are so many alternate ways to play factorio - complete with way deeper tech trees, or a base that teleports between planets every 10 minutes, Seaworld - where you start on a tiny island with nothing but ocean in every direction. And as others have mentioned, the game is rock solid. Multiplayer is an absolute blast.