Recent reviews by pontifex

Enjoying the sequel

erm good

"Can't communicate with the server, try again later" I own the game on steam :(

Gives B-K Nuts and Bolts, Simpleplanes, and Lego robot vibes

Kithack is a great building game and I like making cars in it :)

It good

Let me start by saying this game has an incredibly long way to go and is in beta alpha just like every other hype worth game released in 2022 and 2023 🥲. Despite my worries with any early access project (anyone still remember Drone?), the development team is very active and is listening to the community a lot more than I expected, so I still have hope that it gets to a full release, and that that full release looks like a good robot crafting and shooting game. I just want to throw it out there that it's probably worth it to wait until this game has more content and is more polished, because there are a lot of bugs to work out with just about everything this game tries to do.

To start, the editor is much more complicated than RC1, and the learning curve will, and probably already has turned people away from the game entirely. Once you understand whats going on, the editor is so much more powerful than the first game, and it is a genuine joy to use most of the time. I say most of the time because the other times the game will either force close itself when it encounters an error (save frequently) or the complexity will feel like a hindrance- it takes too long to do the thing you want to do or you don't even know how to do the thing you want to do and you feel like that is the game's fault. However you can pull off some crazy things with the new tools the game gives you, and you can see this first hand by downloading community made designs that you can buy with in game currency and then fight with. If learning the complicated editor doesn't sound fun to you then try playing a couple games and saving up to download a top rated design in the community store. Something that would help the complicated editor issue is better UI (the UI across the entire game sucks). Right now it's very difficult to tell what any of the buttons in the editor do, even when you push them. There isn't a dedicated help button that stands out. Labeling tabs and buttons when you hover over them, having a clearly labeled help button and a decent tutorial would all go a long way to help this issue.

Graphics are another area where this game almost is great but is somehow severely lacking at the same time. Let me explain- the graphics engine is clearly upgraded from RC1, but the robot texture on your avatar thing moves and stretches like human skin which is a little unsettling. Not just that bug, but many textures in the game feel lazy. The models look good, and there's enough variation and theme in maps that you can tell thought went into them (though there's work to be done to make maps and buildings more interesting). The textures are a detriment here because they make things feel like plastic. There aren't many interesting specular effects and many of the parts you put on your robots are extremely flat and plastic looking. The exception here in my opinion is the texture for the rubber on tires, since it is one of the only interesting to look at textures for blocks in the game right now. In game, there are no interesting signs of wear on buildings that would make them believable. Put tire tracks on big openings so you can tell it's being used, give me some warning stickers and labels and access panels on things (everything!) that makes me believe that they are meant to exist and be serviced and used. Also give me more graphics options! I have a computer that can go fast, so please, if it is struggling make it make sense why. Optimizations need to happen, along with more, separate options for graphics settings like every other game in existence has. Some simple things to add would be separate and more powerful anti aliasing options. Whatever the default AA is for the highest quality settings is is terrible. Better anisotropic filtering would help too, along with any of the new, fancy AA or up-scaling A.I.'s released by AMD, NVIDIA and Intel. Though I'm sure implementing those isn't as easy as installing a plugin. Also a bit of a tangent here, but windows game overlay can't show anything in the performance panel, like CPU, GPU or FPS monitoring just doesn't work which is strange. Also, I think this game overrides the media player controls in windows somehow? Not sure whats going on here, but spotify and youtube are completely unaware of my media keys while this game is running. Not being able to skip, or play/pause a song or video with a hotkey while in game is very frustrating and doesn't happen with any other program or game I have. It would be quite silly if Robocraft was intercepting my skip and play pause commands since there's nothing that it could do with those anyway.

Lastly, and I know this will get better as more content is added to the game and competitive balancing takes it's course, but weapons feel soooo weird. Lasers are the exception and feel *fine*, but plasma and rail guns feel icky and clunky to use. Plasma *was* somewhat of an artillery weapon, just like it was in RC1, but then they nerfed the range on it, making the damage and explosion radius decrease the further the projectile flies. This makes bombing aircraft and artillery type vehicles feel way too weak to be viable in a "meta" sense, which in my opinion should be reversed since these are some of the more interesting uses of a plasma gun. If you want to nerf them over range, make the arcing stronger. Despite having some arc, the plasma feel more or less like they travel in a straight line. RC1 had a good balance for this if memory serves. Now for rail guns. Rail guns are supposed to be sniper rifle weapons. They are long range and have a damage buff over the distance they travel (which feels very weird as you can imagine). There are some big issues here though- the amount of recoil they produce makes shots go wildly off if your vehicle isn't extremely heavy and stable, and this is compounded by the fact that there is RANDOM SPREAD on a sniper rifle type weapon. You might think that's normal, but the amount of spread is ridiculous. I can understand recoil and maybe a tiny bit of random spread, but as it sits right now there is a good chance if your shot is dead on you will miss completely. I still haven't mentioned the travel time either though. Rail guns have insane travel time and are almost impossible to account for unless your target is sitting perfectly still or moving in a straight line. In my opinion, the rail gun should hit it's target almost instantaneously after it is fired. Having travel time that makes aiming over great distances more and more difficult negates the whole reason damage increases over distance to begin with- and that is to use it at great distances! Random spread and travel time doesn't feel good when you feel like you've done everything you can to line up a shot perfectly and miss anyway, especially when playing sniper. And while I'm here, the reload time on rail feels wayyy too long right now compared to lasers. Lasers feel solid at almost any range, have good fire rate and damage and don't have insane recoil. Plasma is slow too, but this would be fine if it didn't lose it's power over distance and felt impactful when you hit with a arcing projectile.

I hope the developers aren't discouraged over the mostly negative reaction so far to the game exiting alpha. I can see the vision and potential here, and it's exciting! I think many of the negative reviewers are trying to be constructive like I am here, but some are being silly or unfair simply because this game isn't 2015 RC1. I set my review to recommended not because I would actually recommend you play it right now, but because I believe you should play it in a few months (and maybe a little bit to offset some of the undeserved negative reviews).

cool

haha ok

Servers suck, get leaver penalties from the game crashing. Good one.