We factory sim perverts have all known the joy of combing a mile of conveyor belt tagliatelle for that one empty hopper or unplugged furnace that’s stalled the entire production line. Now, imagine that the stalled production line is producing plasma swords for your army of murder droids.
You need your army of murder droids to fight another army of murder droids, but unfortunately, all of your murder droids are now swordless, and therefore murder droids no longer. They advance placidly into the firestorm, falling like mown dandelions, while you run your cursor desperately over the hexagonal smokestacks. There it is! A misfiring 3D printer, right in the centre.
This is a hypothetical scenario, based on fervent perusal of the Warfactory Steam page. As you’ve hopefully guessed, it’s a mix of “lite” 4X, factory sim and real-time strategy game. You play an ancient AI, possibly a cousin of Destiny’s Warmind, who wakes up after humanity’s extinction and decides to conquer the galaxy, planet by planet.
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“Your factory assembles every robot warrior part by part,” explain developers Terricon Games. “Hulls, weapons, and propulsion systems are fully interchangeable. Link different production hubs to create new unit types in seconds.
“Retool your factory on the fly,” it continues. “Need mobility on broken terrain? Swap legs for treads. Facing armor? Switch to armor-piercing loadouts. Your production line becomes your strategy.”
Please can I make just the one robot huge enough to sit on all the others, Terricon? It shouldn’t matter too much if there are some modules missing. I will dedicate entire planets to the fabrication of Dat Ass. Its name shall be Godzillass – a name that can only ever be whispered in dread or screamed in terror, as the enormous, sexy shadow descends.
Going by the trailer, those planetary maps consist of regions with their own fog of war, which seems like it’ll make the early game less frenetic and more incremental-feeling than it clearly could be. The visuals blend “sci-fi with Japanese and East Asian aesthetics”, and the Steam page is accordingly sprinkled with steely industrial haiku.
There’s a choice of hand-crafted story and open-ended roguelite modes featuring an upgradeable mothership. Multiplayer features should follow after launch in 2026. If that’s too long to wait, the developers are also hosting a playtest – find out how to sign up here.
This is far from the only factory sim in which you have to maintain a military alongside your production lines – Dyson Sphere Program players will be perfectly at home, I’m sure – but I like the emphasis here on a single bottleneck breeding catastrophe. It’s also quite a grim project in context. Terricon are a new Ukrainian team, as are publishers Palaye, and naturally, I’m wondering how much the full mobilisation ethic of Warfactory reflects life in the country right now, as the Russian invasion continues.
