After being a regular cracktorio addict I can't find this game as good as everyone says it is. I played all but the last tier of research with my friends a couple of weeks back.
Building is driving me nuts. Belts are not connecting to where you want them (looking at you stacked splitters). Before you unlock any kind of flying, building in levels just suck. Why does the game even have a landscape when you have to pave it over with foundations... for best effect you do this up in the sky so boulders and stuff is out of the way.
All building are fucking humongous and the heights are not sized with the walls in mind. You have to build 4m wall then a 2m wall at least to put foundations above for another level for the small assemblers... "Small".
After exploring the blueprint editor most of the irritating stuff disappeared as I could just plop down blueprint on blueprint but why is the editor sooooooo small? Want to build anything with the largest assemblers... Well you better try to stuff the rest into the smallest space ever because those large ones takes like 25% of the whole blueprint each!
Research is so bad also. I like the progress steps but the materials needed... Who came up with that? Make stuff that isn't needed anywhere else and once you are done you should just stop that factory or end up wasting a ton of resources. Talking about wasting resources... Inputs keep stacking into at least 100 in each machine so if you have splitter after splitter after splitter etc the last machines in the row will get starved for hours before full production is possible.
In the end i thought that trains would be great for our base. That station is so big i almost fell off my chair when i saw it. My god. Tried to combine one station for unloading 3 different resources into our base. Huge mistake. It kind of worked for two. Then getting the resources from wherever in the world to this station... Nope. Mountains everywhere making it almost impossible to put rails to the mines.
Both me and my friends felt we were done with this disaster of a game. One of my friends brought Factorio because of it and now he is also addicted so if anything i am happy i have played satisfactory, had the experience and have another friend to play the better game with.
Doubt we will return to satisfactory. Sorry for this wall of text rant. I just don't get the popularity when factorio is lightyears ahead with superior gameplay.
Tldr: satisfactory, a game if you want to get upset at bugs and poor design decisions. 5/10