Recent reviews by robble robble {->SDN<-}

First of all, yeah, it's still "early access". When THAT changes, this review might change also.

|EDIT: I considered flipping this to a "marginal thumbs-up" because although the flaws outlined below still persist, it's fun enough to keep playing in spite of them, and the devs seem to be heading in the right direction. And I built a couple progressively-more-sophisticated (and less-fragile) vehicles. But as I pass level 20, it's ultimately just a lot of pointless crystal-shootin' in its current state; no comms, no groups, no daily goals, ...

|EDIT: I ground my way to level 30, and it's all just crystal-shootin' at this point, but I'm having fun engineering some stuff; see self-comments in thread below for some building tips. Also needed to update this review for the Steam Autumn Sale badge, so there, I edited it.

- Lots of crashes and disconnection issues. No surprises there.
- Traditional long wait times to play. As in, 2-10 minutes in the wait queue. It's what we've all come to expect from Freejam, after all.
- Annoying mechanic of being able to spontaneously recreate a vehicle out of the ether, on the battlefield, anytime, as long as you haven't been shot in the last 10 seconds. This means you need to hunt down opponents and kill them ALL THE WAY DEAD, or they'll just effectively "respawn" right next to you with a brand-new bot. Kinda fun to terrorize newbies with, but the novelty wears off really quickly.
- Very little thought put into the user interface progression; interstitial animations and "wait... loading" screens with NOTHING else on them, instead of SHOWING you something (final round score or whatever) and putting the "loading..." indicator ON THAT PAGE. It's slightly better than Robocraft 1, which even after almost a decade of revisions, still remains one of the penultimate case-studies in how to do this WRONG.
- Currency is still pointlessly confusing and redundant. The green piles ("robits") are earned through battle performance, but accruing them appears to be utterly useless after you've unlocked all the builder features? Toilet paper ("TP") is what you get from leveling up and is spent unlocking superficial skins in the Battle Matrix. Gullible Chump ("GC") is just in-game money you bought with real money. Separate from all that is experience points ("XP") which you earn through battle performance and determines your level. Is anyone else detecting pointless redundancy in that list?
+ UI does have a nice "red dot" on every choice that has new options available since you last looked at it, making new unlocks easy to find.
-+ It feels kind of like a slow grind initially since there are so few options available, but by the time you reach level 5 after playing for a couple evenings, you will have unlocked all pertinent builder features.
-+ There only seem to be about 3 maps that just randomly cycle through, and only one battle mode.
+ OMG wheeled vehicles are actually drivable again! (unlike Robocraft 1 where they just made the physics model more and more broken in the years between 2015-2023, making almost all wheeled and many hover vehicles basically useless)
+ Did I mention that friggin wheels are actually useful again! ?
+ The potential build sophistication is off the charts; sensors, conditional logic, threshold and math and logic controls, powered joints, ... the wild and crazy ideas abound for what you can build!
- That being said, my attempt to build an 8-wheeled vehicle ended up being functional once I worked out the rear-wheel steering, but was fragile to the point of being useless trash. I basically just use THE DART (very first vehicle available) since its rapid-fire turret is ideal for capping points and knocking down airborne opponents, and it's just fast as hell. Eventually I'll get bored with that and go back to bot designing.
- It's ultimately a pointless and empty experience in its present form. There is NO communication or coordination possible between teammates, not even taunting of opponents or canned radio blurbs. Even if you've got friends on discord, there's no party formation before joining a match or ANYTHING. So if you make the coolest-looking bot imaginable, nobody can even compliment you on it. All they can do is shoot at you. So... WHY?
$ A quick skim of all the things you can unlock just by leveling up and spending TP... pretty much looks like all superficial aesthetic "upgrade" skins.
$$ To make the blue-bordered stuff available, you first need to "upgrade matrix" with 1000 GC, which translates to USD$8, and gets you... a bunch more superficial aesthetic "upgrade" skins. Oh yeah, and XP multipliers so you can level up faster while playing less.
+ In spite of my naysaying, I must credit Freejam for continuing to avoid a "pay2win" model. You can spend money to look good, or level up without playing as much, but everyone's on a level playing field in terms of actual gameplay. Skill, tactics, and objective focus still win, and creative bot engineering and construction definitely don't hurt.

TL;DR: Ultimately a pointless and empty experience. Extremely sophisticated customization abilities, which is arguably the MAIN point of Robocraft, but... THEN WHAT??? If I can't even taunt an opponent after blowing them away with the awesome school bus I spent three late evenings constructing, and I can't join forces with friends, why am I playing this game?

|EDIT: Updating again for no reason aside from the Steam Awards achievement.

"This is what you get when you buy Darius on Wish"... is what my clever snarky one-liner review would've been if this game stunk.
But it's actually a fantasticly engaging shooter. Oh sure, it borrows a LOT of familiar elements; Darius, obviously, and some R-Type, and Gradius, and Raiden, and Asteroids, and ... too many others to list. But far from being the hodge-podge of recycled ideas it could've been, Operation STEEL bundles them together in a tight little "rogue-lite" package where the levels are procedurally generated and the powerup drops are "random"

• .
  
  
• The footnote on "random" is that you can pause the game to see the "SEED", so if you WANT to run the same drops again, you can write that down and enter the same SEED value for a future run (caveat that things get shuffled when you unlock something new, but once you've unlocked everything you're golden!). This alone is an innovative enough feature to earn the forgiveness of anyone who resented the other borrowed/reused ideas!
  
  All in all, this is a very impressive offering from what is pretty much a one-person dev team -- who, by the way, is still very active and responsive to bug reports and suggestions posted in the community discussions, almost two years after its release (which is a refreshing restoration of my faith in humanity).
  
  The difficulty curve ramps up quite nicely; it's not "bullet hell" like some of those Japanese arcade games that only gives you ONE way out of the grinder and screws you if you miss it... but it gets ALMOST that rough as you get into the final stages. There's a whole rainbow of weapon choices and secondary items and passive upgrades, to help you out wherever you are on the "spectrum" of shooter preferences. You'll just have to keep playing until you stumble across the perfect SEED that drops your ideal combination of goodies to make it through to the end!

You click. You get poop.
You buy upgrades. You get more poop faster.
I mean, it's $.28 on sale, were you expecting rubies and emeralds??

2/10 Would not recommend this particularly haphazard method of extinguishing people who are on fire.

Pros:
+ was released in 2022 so I could nominate it for Game of the Year and get my achievement without buying any more new games.
+ was really cheap in some bundle I don't even remember buying.

Cons:
- read Obey the Fist!'s actual helpful review for detailed research on asset-flipped Unity prebuilt demos being turned into "games" and fake reviews and shady scams being pulled using the Steam platform.
- stopping, dropping, and rolling are all more fun than this, whether done individually or in rapid succession.

This version does most things quite well.
The things it does poorly, though, are so stupid that it makes the overall experience INFURIATING.

For example, you only have one life, and when you die, the programmers decided that you should INSTANTLY see a completely useless gigantic "GAME OVER" blank screen that does NOT include the progress or score you had at the time of death. WHAT THE H3LL?!?!??? Did I almost make it? I'll never know, because the programmers felt compelled to scream "F U" in my face instead.

And some of the levels get so busy that the sound engine just gives up on making sound effects altogether, rather than just throttling the redundant low-priority ones. Come on. Didn't anyone PLAYTEST this thing??? (I don't have anything too exotic, just a motherboard-mounted Realtek configured for 4-speaker surround)

And when using a twin-stick setup (because IT'S BLACK WIDOW, duh), when you push the firing stick in any direction, the first shot it takes is in the direction the spider is facing, NOT the direction you pushed the stick. This seems like a minor nitpick, until you try one of those stupid challenges where you're not allowed to kill a certain enemy type... which becomes VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE because of this ill-conceived control mechanic.

Seriously, I have top-10 world record scores in most of the challenges (I'm not bragging, mind you; it's not a terribly popular game), but a couple of them are just Tourettes-inducing, blood-vessel-bursting, ragefugginquittingly IMPOSSIBLE.

Which is maddening because most aspects of the game are pretty well done. (And of course you have to overlook the absurdity of a spider dying instantly if any random passing fly flaps it with a wing...)

Pretty basic, but plenty fun for the asking price!

|EDIT: See comments; turns out this is just another asset flip, in this case "Endless Car Chase Game Template" for Unity. It's still pretty entertaining, but the party selling this on steam doesn't deserve any of the credit (or income!) for that >:-P

Nice "update", idiots. Released a patch, with no patch notes or news announcement, and now it just hangs/crashes on the main menu on those rare occasions that it GETS that far... and takes Steam with it?? That's grade-A trashware.

Finally, a driving game that feels like you're driving a real car with a real suspension, not just sliding a car-shaped hockey puck around on a track-shaped ice rink. And you get to customize the bejeezus out of them. And then smash them into things! No powerups, no rubberbanding, just driving (and crashing) skills.

A worthy sequel. Liked the original? Nothing to dislike here.