Factorio

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1-64 Co-Op (Online)

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

Factorio is a Management Simulation released in 2020 on PC, ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022, and then ported to Nintendo Switch 2 in 2025. And I’ll get right to it – this game is dangerous. This is one of those games that can easily become an obsession. It’s a game where I sat down one evening to play through the tutorial and ended up ignoring tutorial goals to further perfect my machine network, until I realized I had been playing for five hours straight and if I didn’t force myself to sleep my body would start shutting down.

The premise of Factorio has players finding themselves on a strange hostile world needing to craft the tools they require to survive. By now, this formula is well-worn, with plenty of games doing something similar. However, Factorio isn’t a Survival Adventure, it’s a Management Simulation, and that is because you approach the problem of survival on a much more massive scale, not by tying a stick to a rock to build an axe, but by establishing a massive interconnected automated assembly line.

This may seem complicated, and it certainly can be. But the game’s tutorial does a good job getting you up to speed. You control a character who can move around, chop down trees, and mine ores, but this is inefficient and time-consuming, so you build a machine to mine the ore for you, and then a conveyor belt to deliver the ore to a furnace to process into usable crafting materials. Then you build a hydroelectric plant to supply power to your machines so you don’t have to keep constantly refilling them with coal to keep them running. Then you build a factory to assemble crafting recipes for you so you can mass-produce them. And you build other factories to mass-produce products using the build you just mass-produced… and on and on and on…

You’ll find yourself fighting off hostile fauna of the alien world, at first with a simple handgun, then with better guns you craft, then with automated turrets that can defend your growing factory without you needing to be present – be sure to supply them with ammunition, or perhaps set up an automated assembly line to build and supply them with ammunition while you focus your efforts elsewhere. There’s moments where this feels a bit like Starcraft, setting up bunkers to fend off Zergling raids, but the gameplay overall remains focused on building and growing your machine network.

On Nintendo Switch, Factorio has been reworked to use traditional gamepad controls, and this works, but it’s far from ideal. By default, the game tries to guess at what you’re trying to interact with using the right analog stick, but for precision you’ll press in the right analog stick to control an on-screen cursor. For the most part this works well enough, but each input method feels just a bit clunky depending on the situation.

The real frustration here is menu navigation, with this game’s menus still clearly designed to work with a mouse, even sometimes requiring you to move a cursor up to the upper-right corner to click on an “X” to close a menu. Also, it’s frustrating when you have a crate or a factory filled with items that you have to manually shift one-by-one into your inventory instead of simply pressing a “take all” button. What’s more, many commands require a combination of button-presses, which doesn’t come naturally and seems really inelegant. This game definitely needed more work done to adapt its gameplay to console.

While gamepad controls leave something to be desired here, players do have other options. In handheld mode, players can opt to play with a combination of gamepad controls and the touchscreen, which work well, though the small screen size can make some of the text harder to read. You can also hook up a USB mouse and keyboard and play that way – the game does support this interface on Nintendo Switch. I don’t know how likely you are to use this option, but it is an option you have.

In addition to the gamepad control issues, Factorio also had to undergo some small compromises to work on the limited hardware of the Nintendo Switch. Beyond reductions to resolution and framerates compared to the PC version, as well as other limitations when you’re looking at the game on its largest scale, including the inability to use the more recently-released Space Age expansion. Of course, many of these issues are addressed in the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, but I’ll get to that farther down.

When it comes to the presentation, Factorio uses mostly 2D visuals with some 3D elements, with everything looking dingy and ungainly in a way that, again, reminds me of classic Starcraft. However, while not impressive up-close, Factorio is a marvel to look at when you see the sort of scale of what you can accomplish, a massive network of machines and conveyor belts with swinging arms moving items from one place to another, all at once. These visuals are backed by a subdued, unsettling soundtrack highlighting the dangerous and alien nature of the environment while remaining in the background and allowing you to focus on getting your latest addition to your network connected and deciding which path to have your next conveyor take.

Finally, I should note that Factorio does technically support cross-play across PC, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2, though only if every machine is running the same version of the game (so you may have to use Steam’s “Beta Branch” feature to get it to connect to someone running the game on a Nintendo platform).

In the end, while the Nintendo Switch port of Factorio does have limitations, and the transition to gamepad controls is severely lacking, this is still a magnificent game, one of the best Management Simulations I’ve played, and one that will easily eat up hundreds of hours of your life if you let it. It’s not a game for everyone – it can get quite complex. However, for those with the patience to learn how this game works, it is deeply rewarding. And while the Nintendo Switch version of the game has issues, it’s still perfectly playable and none of those issues changes that. If the idea of setting up your own massive factory where everything works to your design is something that appeals to you, consider this an absolute must-have.

tl;dr – Factorio is a Management Simulation where players build automated machines on an alien world, increasingly expanding them into a functioning assembly line network. It can get a tad complex, and the Nintendo Switch version of the game has a few measured cutbacks and occasionally-clunky controls, but none of that mars what is a deeply-compelling game with tons of depth that will keep you engaged for potentially hundreds of hours. If you’re a fan of this genre, this is definitely a game you’ll want to own.

Grade: A-

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

Factorio – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1-64 Co-Op (Online)

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Review:

Factorio isn’t a technically-impressive game for any sort of graphical reason, but it is a demanding one due to the massive number of moving parts the game can have active at any time, so there definitely seems to be potential for improvement when moving from the dated hardware of the Nintendo Switch to the more powerful Nintendo Switch 2. However, a look at the added features included with this free upgrade listed on Nintendo’s website is surprisingly lengthy:

Mouse Mode support, resolutions improved to 4K docked and 1080p in handheld mode, variable refresh rate support, improved animations, higher-resolution sprites, other non-specified visual improvements, faster loading times, and the ability to build larger bases, a compromise made to get the game to work on the Nintendo Switch that is no longer needed on Nintendo Switch 2. Not listed among these improvements is one more: Nintendo Switch 2 players can choose to purchase the game’s $35 Space Age expansion, which the Nintendo Switch version doesn’t support. While this release still doesn’t have the PC version’s support for user-created mods, the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of the game otherwise appears to be feature-complete.

So, how does all of this stack up, in practice?

The improvements to resolution and framerate are certainly noticeable, making the overall experience much smoother here. The higher-resolution textures are also much nicer, particularly foliage like grass. And the loading times are certainly improved too – the game takes 1 minute 40 seconds to load to the main menu on Nintendo Switch, and 1 minute even on Nintendo Switch 2 (after this, it took less than a second to load a saved game on each).

However, I think pretty much everyone will agree that the star here is Mouse Mode. Factorio uses dynamic Mouse Mode on Nintendo Switch, and players can set the game to use either the left or right Joy-Con 2 controller for this. And it works… pretty much exactly how you’d want (though there are a ton of settings to mess around with if you want to change things).

Overall, Factorio on Nintendo Switch 2 addresses the Nintendo Switch version’s biggest issues, and improves the game in multiple other ways. For Management Simulation fans, this make the game a must-buy for pretty much everyone except those with an aversion to complex mechanics and those who insist on playing the game on their PC. Otherwise, I cannot recommend this game enough.

tl;dr – Factorio is a Management Simulation where players build automated machines on an alien world, increasingly expanding them into a functioning assembly line network. It can get a tad complex, but if you can get past that you’ll find this is a deeply-compelling game with tons of depth that will keep you engaged for potentially hundreds of hours, and the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition improves on the Nintendo Switch version in multiple ways, including excellent dynamic Mouse Mode controls. If you’re a fan of this genre, this is a must-have.

Grade: A

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