It’s somewhat similar. As a 3D first person game it more complicated to get things to line up and get a good view of things. You do have the ability to build up which is nice.

Early game is a pain because it takes much longer to get automated power. You constantly are running back to get more wood and fill the power generator.

Combat is terrible. It’s a pain in the butt and never gets satisfying. There are no turrets. Monsters don’t attack the factory though just you.

Resources come from nodes on the map that never run out. So you get x per second from a node and can latter do things to improve the number.

So you don’t run into things like when green circuits stop producing because a copper patch ran out.

Belts are single row instead of double row so no option of side by side or double product. Instead of inserters you have joiners and splitters. So a iron ore belt goes into a smelter and a belt of ignots comes out. You then join the output of multiple smelters.

Personally I find the belt system super tedious. Trying to run a triple stack of belts is a long boring pain in the ass. Fps target a stackable pole and then two on top. Repeat another stack hopefully less the a max belt length. Then target from a to b 3 times to build the actual belts. Repeat for the next section.

When you get blueprints they come late and are small. Then never get very large. No just dropping in a big smelter plant. You drop in small clusters of smelters and manually connect them. Blueprints don’t tile like in factorio so you have to connect them manually.

There are never any interesting builds. Its just use a, b to make c, d, e, to make f and then c, f to make g.

The most interesting thing is alternative recipes. You hunt around the map for crashed ships and collect the drives. Research them and get alternate recipe for a part. They always have an interesting trade off. Fewer or different resources in exchange for faster, slower, simpler or more complex builds.

For example reinforced plates take iron plates and bolts. Bolts take rods and ignots. Stiched reinforced plates replace bolts with copper wire and are simpler to make but use copper.

In general it feels like every upgrade comes to late and is underwhelming. Blue prints, combat, transport, etc.

Overall I think it’s ok not great like Factorio. I doubt I would have finished the final end game construction if I wasn’t playing with friends.

There is also the writing which is annoying and the small story goes nowhere. It’s mostly just a constant reminder that the company doesn’t care about you and work harder. It’s supposed to be funny I think but it’s the same tired joke over and over.