Factorio

Factorio is a game where the player has landed on an alien planet and is tasked with preparing the planet for a colony ship to arrive from earth. This is done by mining ores and then using them to produce materials and machines. All of this can be automated using conveyor belts, automated assembly machines and many other things. The game is in late alpha at the moment and costs €10 (roughly $13US or £8.20) which is a very reasonable price for a game as well put together as this one seems to be on first impressions. 

Official screenshot (not one of mine)

The game is a bit like Minecraft in some respects, however this game is a top down view of the world rather than a first person view and there is much less physical mining to be done and more automation, engineering and even research needed in order to progress through the game. Obviously as the game isn't finished there are a few things that will change, but nothing seems broken. Everything works as it should, there don't seem to be any bugs or glitches and it is surprisingly fun. I have only just got the game so this is a bit of a first impressions post at the moment and I can't say that more of the late game stuff involving logic and complex wiring works perfectly. But the early game, mechanical system of automation works very well. 

The amount of planning that is needed to ensure that the conveyor belt lines all stay separate and that the right goods go to the right place and then they get made into the right thing that then gets taken somewhere else is substantial. I have played a game where I ended up not giving myself enough room to work and messed up my production of science packs a little bit and spent a good while trying to fix this issue. I was surprised at how not-boring this was, I guess I just enjoy problem solving and things like that and I guess that's one reason I really like this game and would recommend it to anyone who liked Minecraft or who is interested in this sort of thing. 

Yes, trains!

Although it can look really complex and quite daunting, so far I've found that it really isn't that hard so long as you take it slowly and think about what you are trying to do and think about what each part of the "machine" needs to do and how it will do that. There are so many different things that you can do and I can see myself spending hours on this game.

There are enemies and there is a working combat system with regenerating health and auto-aim with the pistol and the SMG. There is an abundance of technologies to research, unlocking more and more things that you can craft that will enable you to build more complex machines that are able to do more so that you can automate more and your base grows exponentially in complexity and in size as you progress. However as everything can be done slowly it isn't too difficult a task for even a novice like me to set up some reasonably complex (I think) systems without much trouble.

To conclude, I would recommend this game to most of my friends as it is really fun, but I can see that some people might not enjoy it quite so much due to the complexity of bits of it but when you finish building a machine that works it just feels good and it looks incredibly cool. There is a free demo, which includes the first three levels of the tutorial campaign over on the Factorio website so if you're interested do go check it out.