Abiotic Factor Review - Strangely Fun Science

At some point, older gamers would probably have a thought like, "I wish I could play Half-Life in multiplayer with my friends." Given enough time, someone was bound to make such an experience happen. In our Abiotic Factor review, you'll get to see just how Deep Field Games managed to deliver on this childhood fantasy of many.

Abiotic Factor puts you in the shoes of the newest employee of the GATE Cascade Research Facility, an expansive underground facility in Australia that researches portal technology and strange entities from other dimensions. Things go badly wrong on your first day, necessitating a lot of creative thinking to escape this underground bunker.

Theoretically Surviving

You'll begin your time in Abiotic Factor by creating your character (as one typically does in survival games). While you can change your appearance at any time from the main menu, your Job will determine which special abilities and starting skills (and in some cases, starting equipment) you'll start the game with. When that's done, you're off to the races.

Players first set foot in the Cafeteria of the Office Sector, the aptly-named sector of the GATE Facility that has offices. A man named Dr. Thule is sitting on a bench, and the nearest door to the wider facility is broken. This is a second tutorial of sorts, allowing you to figure out crafting and interacting with devices before you get to explore further.

Beyond this Cafeteria is the Office Sector's plaza. Its most notable feature is several Tram stations. Key points in other sectors connect to these tram stations. They're quite important as there's no fast travel at the start of the game; you'll have to walk everywhere or drive a vehicle, at least until you unlock teleporters.

Before long, you'll encounter your first roadblock: the door to the Manufacturing Sector is broken, and you'll have to power up a nearby forklift to open it. Unfortunately, the required item is nowhere to be found in the GATE Facility — you'll have to travel to a portal world to get it.

The Paradox of Portals

The various portal worlds are other dimensions (and sometimes, other places on Earth) that are a main subject of research in the GATE Facility. Typically, you'll have to go to a Portal World to retrieve a key crafting material or unlock an alternate route to allow you to progress deeper in the facility.

Portal Worlds obey some strange rules; they "reset" twice a week, completely respawning all of their enemies and crafting materials. As a comparison, the GATE Facility is in the "real" world; once you break a piece of furniture or pick up an item, it's gone forever.

One portal world even puts you in a level from a Nintendo 64 era video game and forces you to jump on the heads of enemies to kill them.

The GATE Facility is strange enough, but the various portal worlds are where Abiotic Factor's world design truly shines. You might encounter a different set of physics, an alien environment, or even total genre shifts; one portal world even puts you in a level from a Nintendo 64 era video game and forces you to jump on the heads of enemies to kill them.

The various odd artifacts brought back from these portal worlds add a good bit of fanciful scientific flair to Abiotic Factor. Sure, you could run around with a shotgun like Gordon Freeman, but you can just as easily catch a Skink and modify it into a living cannon that spews radioactive waste.

Multiplayer Magic

Abiotic Factor would have been fun enough as a single-player game, but the addition of multiplayer makes it something special. There's a lot to do in the GATE Facility, and having a couple of extra pairs of helping hands can make things much easier.

Naturally, you'll need to explore the GATE Facility and fight enemies, but that's just a small part of the overall equation. There are fishing, farming, and cooking systems that can support your survival and exploration efforts, and you'll often have to spend some amount of time going back to old portal worlds to refill your crafting materials.

Bringing in other people to play with you allows them to focus on specific roles. My girlfriend, for example, absolutely loves any game with fishing or cooking, and she often spends her time hooking and cooking with the best of them. Another mutual friend of ours enjoys running around the GATE Facility and collecting every single item he can.

Mind, nobody needs to split up the work like this, but you can. Every player is free to do whatever they'd like to within the GATE Facility. This includes exploration; in some areas with multiple objectives, you could divvy up the tasks and make it through an area even faster.

Refining the Hypothesis

As a survival game, a big part of Abiotic Factor involves taking care of your daily needs and protecting your stuff. This necessitates building a base somewhere, and the possibilities are truly and genuinely endless.

The only real requirement for a base is access to a single power plug anywhere in the base or in any of the portal worlds. Want to turn an empty roadway into a cozy shantytown? You can do that. If you have a hankering for some Silent Hill, you could permanently move into the portal world of Flathill. There are very few places where you can't build.

Simply put, Abiotic Factor offers many opportunities for players to get creative in all sorts of ways.

This creative freedom extends to the various wacky scientific devices that you can build, too. One late-game item is a Hardlight Bridge, a surface created of pure energy that can be used to cross massive gaps. With some lateral thinking, you'll recognize that this also makes for an excellent force field if you place it on a wall instead.

There are some practical concerns in the early game; you'd want to stay near The Office Sector for easy access to the trams and other shortcuts to other sectors. The eventual acquisition of teleporters makes this less of a concern. Heck, you could even have each player have their own little home base somewhere in the GATE Facility.

Simply put, Abiotic Factor offers many opportunities for players to get creative in all sorts of ways. No two bases will look alike, nor will the loadouts and skill choices of players. This isn't just fun, it also massively increases replayability for subsequent playthroughs.

Abiotic Factor Review | Final Thoughts

I've been playing Abiotic Factor since it first launched in Steam Early Access, and I've occasionally gone back to it when a new update comes out. Sometimes I'd play with friends, and sometimes I'd play by myself. Either way, I had tons of fun, and I'm looking forward to more updates coming in the future.

If you're a fan of survival games, Abiotic Factor is a must-play. If you're new to the genre, it's easy enough to pick up that it would serve as an excellent introduction to the genre. And if you're not a fan of this style of game at all, you should still try it — you'll know what it's all about within the first hour or so of gameplay.

The best way I could summarize it is this: I've spent the better part of the last month playing through the game by myself to write guides. I've proverbially driven this game until the wheels fell off, and I'm still excited to start it all over again with my friends on our own server.

Abiotic Factor isn't just a great survival game (and a standout example of the genre), but it's a great game. It has its little flaws, sure, but Abiotic Factor is a masterfully crafted entertainment experience that is sure to make an entire evening disappear before you know it.

Abiotic Factor was reviewed over approximately 130 hours of gameplay on PC via Steam with a key provided by the publisher. All screenshots were taken during the review process.