Unlike a certain other popular factory game, the game is 3D; which lends a lot more to the design of factories. Making your factory sprawl and transporting things across the land makes more sense, and the planet you're on doesn't look like an already predried industrialist hell. And while there are alien creatures, many of them are benign, or at worst limited in number. The developers were nice enough to even include an Arachnophobia mode which turns the dangerous skittery spiders into dangerous skittering cats.
There's things to discover in the overworld, an ACTUAL GOAL, and much more!