[Update]: After nearly a decade in development, Factorio has now finally been released!

Factorio is a game with a simple concept but almost infinite complexity as it tasks you with thinking up and creating fully-automated factories in order to produce increasingly more difficult items.

After being in development for over four years and selling an impressive 110,000 copies Factorio is finally ready to make the big step in to Steam Early Access. Here's the two year old trailer that managed to convince me that Factorio is in fact amazing:

In the very beginning you will need to manually run around and chop wood, mine ore and produce all of the resources you need but soon enough you'll be able to start automating your operation and what once took forever through manual labor will suddenly become an incredibly easy task when the robot workers get on it.

Your huge oilfields, gigantic mines and soot-spewing chimneys might be great for business but the locals that that live next to your ecological disaster of a factory might have a different take on it. So in order to secure your business you will need to be more eco-friendly build and maintain a vast network of security drones and turrets in order to keep your lovely factory from being chomped on.

Negotiating with the locals

If you find yourself overwhelmed with all of the features present in Factorio you could always try playing it through the cooperative multiplayer mode that allows you and a couple of friends to work on the same factory simultaneously thus creating truly extravagant projects.

And if this list of features for an indie game wasn't impressive enough already Factorio also boasts full modding support that allows you to create and share everything from new units, maps, tile-sets to campaign missions and more. The Early Access launch version won't contain Steam Workshop support though it will be coming in the next few updates.

Complex simplicity

Factorio is coming to Steam Early Access on February 25th but I would recommend not buying it there. Instead go through the developer's website which will give you a much cheaper copy and the developer a far greater cut of the profits, a win for everyone.

I'm usually not one to recommend buying in to Early Access titles but after playing through Factorio's demo I can tell you that this is one of the most feature-rich alphas I've had the pleasure of playing in a long time. So give it a try yourself, you might find it as enjoyable as I did.