When compared to other factory games, this one does a lot of things right:
1) There's no time limit, no overlooming threat that is waiting to eat your base and no infinite resources once you setup a miner on a node. So where's the challenge you say? Well, the miners are limited, and there's better resource nodes (Impure, Normal and Pure categories) higher up in the mountains and or near dangerous locations. The challenge in the game comes from instead trying to connect all of your smaller outposts together and expand ever more.
2) The map is a singular gigantic handcrafted map with several starting zones, each subzone has its advantages and disadvantages but the devs made sure that you are able to thrive in any one of them. There's also tons of collectable resources out there that you'll need to find in order to improve your factory by overclocking, improving a personal stash and or etc.
3) The game is 3D, but graphics is not the only reason they went 3D, it's actually a much deeper and intricate game feature, because once you figure out that there's conveyor lifts to move resources up is when you realize that you can expand your factory vertically and expand vertically.
4) Exploration. It's a side focus of this game, but it is really good, it allows you to take a break from the factory and keep on improving your character and factory by finding new stuff to bring back and or finding new nodes or resources and there's also combat with enemies that habitate the world or guard something valuable.
5) The movement options in this game are really good, you can zipline on your power lines, bunny hop around your world, parachute from high elevation and or use something like vehicles or an intricate set of jumping pads that take you from point A to B
6) Instead of giving you a huge end goal that you need to figure out how to get to yourself, the game subdivides it into several phases, where you need to complete their goal before continuing and unlocking new technology