StarRupture is a more accessible, more combat-focused factory-builder

I love me a good logistics game, where all of my time is spent on building some piece of machinery in the most efficient way possible. Of the recent games in this genre, Satisfactory is my drug of choice, and has been for years. But Satisfactory involves math, and belt loops, and all sorts of weird solutions to stay as efficient as possible. It’s not a lot when you get started, but the process overwhelms quickly. 

Enter StarRupture, a new factory-simulator game by Creepy Jar, the folks behind the 2019 survival game, Green Hell. It’s got many of the same efficiency porn ideas as Satisfactory, but its belt splitters and things of that nature tend to auto-sort based on the most efficient placement for your items. Instead of calculating belt speeds, you can simply prioritize a deposit point over a storage facility in order to maintain a consistent flow of resources to your space overlords.

The factory management aspect is just a piece of StarRupture, but it’s the biggest piece of the pie, so we’ll tackle that first. If you’ve ever played a Satisfactory or Factorio, you’ll be very comfortable with StarRupture off the rip. However, you’ll notice that StarRupture has a more linear progression system than other factory games. 

Instead of building out a self-sufficient factory and sending your excess in for upgrades, you’ll be hooking all of your machines into mini-drone mailers from the beginning. You can then select one of five corporations you work with (each of which has its own upgrade track) and choose which of their desired resources — iron bars, for example — that you’d like to send them. Then you just hook your iron bar factory into a drone mailer and you’re good to go.

This is actually great for first-time factory enjoyers, because it forces you to constantly rebuild your factory, rather than building a long train of machines and then doing a rebuild down the line. Now, that might sound like StarRupture is actually more tedious, but the result is that you spend a few minutes adding in a new machine or changing your lines around pretty regularly, which means you’re less likely to run into a bottleneck 10 hours into your save and have to spend an hour rebuilding from scratch.

I hate rebuilding my factories in games, even though I know it's a necessary evil. But each time I have to build a new piece into my factory in StarRupture, I think about calling it a night while I do some light busy work and I’m done before I know it. Every time the fix has been simpler and faster than I’ve anticipated.