Sandbox

Thank you The Molasses Flood for sending us a review code!

The Hollow is becoming infested with a growing evil called The Feral. They’re draining the land’s resources with huge thorny plants and the water surrounding the mini islands is deadly unless you have a special temporary charm to nullify its effects. The inhabitants are getting weaker by the day, so a talking crow crosses over into our realm to seek your character’s assistance in saving their world. Will you accept the challenge? There is an achievement available if you ignore the request, but I was nice and decided to help out.

In order to reverse the damage of The Feral, you have to wake up these gosh darn cute vegetable creatures called drakes. Unfortunately, they’re as needy as they are adorable (similar to a puppy!). Each drake has to have water, food, and entertainment to survive. Yes, these creatures can literally die from boredom. Unfortunately, as they age their requirements go up.

Drake Hollow is broken down into four seasons and to progress to the next one you have to complete a few objectives. In the beginning you’ll learn the basics from the crow on how to gather resources and provide food for the drakes. Since this is a wasteland, resources are scarce and you’ll have to travel further and further away from the camp to gather supplies and awaken more drakes. To make matters worse, your camp is raided at regular intervals by the feral enemies so you’ll have to be there to protect it. Thankfully, there’s a ten-minute countdown clock from when the next raid will commence. If you have a crafting table (and the right components) you can craft teleportation devices to bring you back to camp in a jiffy.

Later in the game you can construct some automated defenses like swirling blade towers and Tesla coils. Until then, you’re stuck with melee and ranged weapons that you find in abandoned buildings and structures. For ranged weapons I liked the nailgun and shotgun. Scrounging up ammo for them can be tricky though. Melee weapons come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You can use wooden branches, chair legs, skis, candlesticks, coat racks, pick axes, guitars, giant hammers, and so on. All weapons break eventually so don’t get too attached to them.

Some islands have supply trucks. If you craft and construct waypoints between them and your camp, supplies will be automatically delivered on a regular basis. As an added bonus you can hop onto and glide on the waypoint wires to quickly travel between the randomly generated islands. Though the regions will differ for everyone they will have a few things in common. One is a lighthouse that will reveal the locations of sleeping drakes on your map if you climb to the very top and get a glimpse of the region. Schematics are also scattered all over the place and these are necessary to unlock new items to build. Last but not least are notes left behind by the previous inhabitants of this world.

To progress the story you need to level up your camp. In order to do that you need to collect and age your drakes. By offering crystals to your drakes, they will mature and their special abilities will become stronger. Each drake has a unique buff that you can equip. The number of available buff slots increases as your camp levels up. Your health and building capacity goes up too. The increased production of food and water buffs are handy, but so are the health stealing and increased chances of a critical hit.

As the seasons change, so do the camp requirements. It’s nice that your camp is brought over intact so you don’t have to start over from scratch each time. In the summer, there’s a shortage of water so you’ll have to compensate for that by building more wells. The winter starts off with everything frozen, including the drakes! You’ll have to thaw them out with torches and install space heaters to get everything up and running again

It’s hard to build up your town, defenses, food and water supply with limited resources. Thankfully, there’s a shop in town that’s operated by a crow that accepts shiny things (silverware) for currency. To make this game more enjoyable for myself, I installed the Windows version (it's free since this is a play anywhere title) and played using my cloud save file. I then used Cheat Engine to give myself $20,000 in shiny things. From them on, I had a more enjoyable experience being able to afford and buy needed components from the store without having to leave my starving and bored drakes behind and defenseless with an incoming raid due in a few minutes.

Overall, Drake Hollow is a fun but frustrating game at times. By reducing some of the stress factors, I enjoyed it more. I have little complaints morally as this title is pretty clean. The drakes and the main character can heal each other with some magical ability. There is violence, but no bloodshed. If your character dies, they can resurrect at camp at the cost of weakening their weapon. Or they can ghost walk and resurrect where their body was left behind.   Before you can move on to the next area, a harvest ritual/dance has to be performed.  Unfortunately, they get interrupted by The Feral attacking the camp.  

This game is beautifully made with colorful scenery, dark and frightening enemies, and adorable drakes oozing with charm and personality. The background music is fitting and the sound effects are well done too.

Despite some setbacks, my experience in this game has more positives than negatives. There is multiplayer support, so having friends assist you in defending your camp and scavenging around is helpful. Ever if you play by yourself, you’ll never be lonely with the sweet but demanding drakes in your camp.

Thank you Moebius Games for sending us this game to review!

Exotic Matter is a Minecraft-like sci-fi survival game that transports you to the fictional planet of Xcylin in the year 12039 in order for you to find a substance known as Violex. Once you do find it, you will be able to power your ship’s engine and allow it to go at light speed. However, the game doesn’t try to adhere you strictly to the mission; in fact, it is quite the open world, allowing you to play and explore. You may want to watch your step, though, because fall damage can be taken. When you respawn in the ship in what the game calls a nanochamber, you don’t respawn with full health. The only way to get it all back is to exit the mission and go back into it again, it seems.

The controls are a little unique, and they certainly take some getting used to for you Minecraft fans out there, myself included. However, Exotic Matter starts you off at the beginning of the mission with a tutorial so you can get used to them. There is a reminder of the basic controls that you will be using the most on the left-hand side of the screen. The UI (user interface) also includes a compass, in-game time of day, a map at the top left hand corner, your health at the bottom left hand corner, your inventory bar, and your equipped items bar. In the inventory menu, I happened to notice that the developers spelled ‘equipped’ wrong and spelled it ‘equiped’ instead. There were also a few occasions where the game crashed on me while it was trying to launch. However, the game is in very early access, so the developers will immediately fix this mistake upon the publishing of this review, I’m sure.

In the daytime, Exotic Matter’s world is open and inviting, but upon entering the night, depending on how your world generated, the night can become very dark and foreboding. (My first world ended up generating at night, in that dark and foreboding state. If you’re anything like me, that is not a good impression to have!) The music is quite ambient, but can get very, and I mean very, ominous at night. The night’s musical style reminds me of Portal-style music a little. Sometimes you may find robot-like NPCs that wander around placing blocks. (Every time I saw one, I would get jumpscared!) Once the sun rises again, the world returns to its open state. The sky is turquoise and there is a bit of (I’m assuming intentional) fog. There is also a huge moon that looms over the planet during the day.

The voxel-like graphics of the game look like a texture pack you would find from Minecraft, with the level of detail on the blocks’ textures. It doesn’t look bad, it’s just that the way the graphics were constructed, that looks a lot like a Minecraftian texture pack.

Exotic Matter also has something called a construct mode, where you can build structures that can appear in your missions. The construct is flat, and all of the pregenerated blocks have a gray checkered pattern on them. You spawn with all of the ingame blocks and items, with 64 of each, as well as some special tools that will help you build and destroy in the construct space. The special construction tools perform a few different actions, including duplicate, create, and destroying blocks. It’s pretty clear in the clumsy layout of the construct mode that the game is trying to focus on the mission mode, which is the main part of it.

The dark and foreboding night may be a bit much for some of the younger audiences. However, there are no moral issues in the game itself, it is merely how the games chooses to present itself visually that makes me concerned. Otherwise, if you are the type of person who loves Minecraft and a good sci-fi adventure, then this is the game for you!

-Kittycathead

Thank you NIS America for sending us this game to review!

We originally reviewed Birthdays the Beginning on the PS4 and found it to be a flawed, but fun experience. The rebranded Switch version comes bundled with DLC, more creatures, and some gameplay enhancements. Though there is still a lot of micromanagement and waiting, there is less guess work and the gameplay is a bit more streamlined.

Happy Birthdays is a 3D sandbox game where you can play through the campaign, challenges, or in free play mode and build up your world from phytoplankton all the way up to humans. The process of evolution requires time, temperature, and proper locations to give birth to new species. God’s way of speaking creatures into existence is much easier by a long shot!

The story remains the same with the main character secretly reading through his/her grandfather’s books. In one of the books is a map of a nearby forest with an “X” marked on it. What kid wouldn’t want to investigate this further? Sure enough, the map leads to a bright light which renders the main character unconscious. Upon waking up, they meet the computer-like Navi who holds them captive until they can create another world capable of sustaining human life.

A new feature in Happy Birthdays is the ability to choose your starting terrain. For a simpler game you can use the green plains or enjoy the freedom that the stony prairie has to offer. Those looking for a more challenging experience may want to try the scorched Earth/dessert or the frozen world.

Navi teaches the basic controls about raising and lowering the terrain and adding water to adjust the temperature. Changing the terrain consumes health, which can be replenished by switching to the macro view and letting time elapse slowly. Speeding up time is possible, but it too consumes health. When you level up, you’ll get more health points which lets you do more between macro view visits. Thankfully, as more and more creatures are birthed into existence, star fragments will become available and you can use them to activate powerful skills that impact the terrain, temperature or let you construct impressive monuments.

In order to progress through the story you have to meet certain conditions, which is hard to do if you kill off a species unintentionally. I like how you can press the right stick to find out what the next evolutionary goal is to succeed in your mission. This is so much better than aimlessly passing time while wondering what crucial species you either killed off or never spawned in the first place. Saving often is highly recommended!

Seeds are shortcuts that allow you to evolve or mutate creatures without meeting the requirements at the moment. If you’re not careful, the newly created species will die off as quickly as it appeared. There are other helpful seeds that allow you to create rivers, moist areas, dry areas, snow, global warming, and so forth. Without the proper terrain, both plants and animals cannot thrive.

In the macro view as time is elapsing you’ll see a breakdown of the life forms on your world. You’ll see green arrows for thriving and red arrows for population declines. Sometimes a species will re-appear after becoming extinct, but that’s not always the case. You’ll also be notified when a new species is birthed. To celebrate the occasion, you should switch to the micro view and check them out. To learn more about the species, this game encourages you to scan them. Stars are earned for each newly scanned species. Every one million years is celebrated and star points are awarded after the announcement.

If you don’t like the restrictions of the story mode, you can do whatever you want in the free play mode. In this mode you can choose the size of your world and grow whatever lifeforms you see fit. There are no goals, time limits, or objectives to complete. If you’re a goal-oriented person, you may enjoy the various dinosaur challenges available.

If you don’t mind the theory of evolution being taught, there is a lot to learn in Happy Birthdays. Kids who like biology or dinosaurs will enjoy this game. Mating or killing is not shown so this title is as kid safe as they come.

The overall presentation is cute and this game performs well on the Switch. The controls may be a bit confusing for younger gamers, but I had no trouble moving about in this title.

In the end, my son and I enjoyed playing Happy Birthdays on our own terms. The story mode requires a lot of micromanagement which may bore some younger gamers. The portability and improvements made in the Switch version make this game the best version available.

Thank you Rank17 for sending us this game to review!

In our age of early virtual reality (VR) experiences, Rank17 has covered most of the bases. They have their sports game (VR Baseball, not reviewed). They have their wave shooter/melee game (BladeShield), and they have their arcade style game (Super Pixel Smash). They even have a zombie shooter (Armed Against the Undead). And with Mighty Monster Mayhem, they also have their Rampage in VR experience. Thankfully, it covers what is important in that genre pretty well.

For those not familiar, Rampage was a classic (1985) arcade game where George, Izzy, and Ralph, a giant gorilla, lizard, and wolf, respectively, set about to destroy a town by gobbling up humans and wrecking nearby skyscrapers. There is some kind of story behind it (and even a major motion picture that was released this year starting Dwayne Johnson), but it was always secondary to the action of bashing buildings, eating people for snacks, and knocking helicopters out of the sky.

There are actually several Rampage clones in VR these days, including one another reviewer played on Oculus Rift, called VRobot. I can’t speak to that game, but my son said he slightly prefers this game over that one.

The backstory on this one is that you take the role of an ostracized scientist who intends to take revenge on those who insulted him and his work. Fully ready for the mad scientist role, you step into his place and you can hear him talk as you smash the town to bits. Some of the voice work is done pretty well, and I had fun hearing it. It does start to repeat after a while though, and he rarely keeps to himself, so some players may find him annoying. I did not.

Each level has a primary objective of destroying a certain number of buildings, along with some handy secondary ones. These include eating scientists or soldiers, destroying mailboxes, recovering DNA, and more. Doing so can sometimes unlock other characters rather than just the default purple giant cephalopod. There are golems, oni, insects, and reptiles available to round out the roster. And there are several different levels with objectives to complete in each one as well.

The main thing about a VR game of this nature isn’t the graphics or sound, though those are important, but the mechanics of smashing things. And this is quite good, though not without the occasional bug or misdetection. The mechanics of punching, ripping apart walls, or picking up and throwing things is decent, though not great. What I really enjoyed was the unique approach to movement it took.

Most VR games 'play it safe,' and have teleport movement only. This means that you point where you want to go, and you are instantly transported there. This works great for many types of games, but not as much for action ones. What they did here is kind of genius. To walk, you click in the grips on the Vive controller, and move your arms in a doggy-paddle like motion. Since you are moving your body, you rarely get sick, and it’s a natural way to move around. I like it. To climb up buildings, you reach up, pull the trigger, and pull down. It’s pretty natural, and well done. You can also leap off of the buildings, which feels crazy since the buildings are so tall.

Of course, with all of that movement, sometimes I found myself slightly motion sick, but it wasn’t bad enough for me to want to stop playing. I drank a glass of water afterwards, and I was fine. The graphics are believable, but nothing special. When picking up people off of the street, they look like the most simple of models, with little more than some face lines drawn on. It makes sense they would be simple given the desire for frame rate over expense when keeping a good experience relies on that more than most other considerations.

The music and sound effects/voices are actually quite good. I found myself actively enjoying the music, and the voice acting does a great job of making you feel a little crazy given the subject at hand. Hearing him talk about how smelly other scientists are and how he still wanted to eat them was worth a nice laugh.

Morally, the expected is here. Lots of violence, and you eat people for fun and they splat red, so there’s that. You are actively ignoring (or destroying) the local military and police, as well. The goal is to get revenge against others, which is hardly wholesome. It is notoriously difficult to take good notes while playing a VR game, but I did not catch any curse words to the best of my memory.

Mighty Monster Mayhem is exactly what it says on the tin – you get to romp around town as a giant monster, and rip apart the town. And you get to do it as a mad scientist, who says many crazy things off-the-cuff. What else is there to say? If that sounds fun to you, then give it a shot – you may just like it.

Your eyes open. You’re on a beach. You look down at your tattered clothing, and you can’t help but notice that everything you owned, everything you carried, is gone. You have nothing with which to defend yourself from the world around but your two blocky fists. You need to find shelter before nightfall, but you have no shovel, no axe. You see a tree, and walk to it. You need tools, and the key to making them lies in its wondrous square logs. With no other choice, you begin to slam your fists into the trunk again and again. Your knuckles should be bruised and bloody, but your hand-cubes stay strong. In just a few moments, the tree is reduced to mere floating blips on the ground, and with a few odd popping noises they fly into your backpack. Now, with some basic supplies, your adventure may begin.

These are the first moments of every Minecrafter’s life. There are no real spoilers to this game, because you are free to do anything you want. Fancy yourself a mile-wide castle? Just maintain the patience of gathering materials. Want to discover the riches of your world? Explore the winding caves that snake through the ground under your square feet, or perhaps dig down to the very bottom of the world and mine away to your hearts’ desire. Nightfall brings darkness, and with it come hordes of terrible monsters that will satiate your appetite for adventure. Also available to those who consider themselves warriors is the Nether, a hellish and demented world accessed via a portal, and the End, the aptly-named endgame world featuring legions of Endermen and the fearsome Ender Dragon. There is even the option of growing wheat, pumpkins, and watermelon for those who like to farm, along with animal breeding.

What really makes Minecraft great is the sandbox gameplay. You can do all of the aforementioned tasks in a “legit” fashion, gathering materials by hand, or enter the game’s Creative mode and receive instant and unlimited access to any material. A quick YouTube or Google search will show both the least and the most imaginative works by people in the Minecraft community: some are content to live in their mud huts, while others prefer a cushier lifestyle in their golden throne rooms. In that respect, the replayability of the game is virtually endless—so long as one can keep the imagination flowing, of course. The gameplay is, sadly, occasionally affected by glitches and bugs, but almost all of them are more than outshined by the fun of the game itself.

The Minecraft community is an incredible resource for those who get lost at some point in their adventure. Because the game has no tutorial, many have taken it upon themselves to create resources for others. The community is also a vast source of resources with which you may change your game to suit your preferences. Texture packs, adventure maps (downloadable maps with a set task or plot), modifications, and general inspiration for building are all examples of community efforts. People both on the official forums and YouTube have created both visually awe-inspiring and technically impressive creations, and there are multitudes of servers to join others. Multiplayer is an especially important part of the game, for it makes large projects easier to take on and allows others to see your creations in-game. Towns spring up around impressive geological features, and community projects can be awe-inspiring. More importantly, it’s just plain and simple fun. Think of it as grown-up Legos, except filled with things that want to kill you.

The technical breakdown of Minecraft is where the game begins to show its more frustrating side. The controls are the standard WASD format, though this may be changed via the in-game menu. The game is also quite buggy at times, and much of the gameplay feels unpolished, especially for an official release. Things that seemed acceptable in Alpha or Beta release, which included occasional visual glitches, animals bugging out and shifting over fences, and other minor bugs, plague the game. However, the game is regularly updated and many of these bugs are in the process of being fixed.

It’s not an especially inspiring game musically, but the sounds fit with the overall feel of the game. Most of us who have played the game have come to love the satisfying “thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-POP” of mining and the odd crunch of grass under our blocky feet. There are musical records that can be obtained in-game, and these can be played on player-crafted record players to add additional atmosphere to the game. 

Graphically speaking, Minecraft doesn’t have much room to boast, either. It must be remembered that the game is intentionally blocky and sometimes even cheesy: even the watermelons grow into cubes. That being said, the graphics are still fairly unimpressive nonetheless. This is especially annoying when the fairly steep system requirements are taken into account. When I bought the game, my laptop was under six months old. However, I had to keep the render distance on “short” so the game wouldn’t lag. Toning down the graphics settings can drastically help this, but such an action detracts from an already lacking aspect of the game. One’s visual experience can also be improved through the use of community-made texture packs and mods.

As for family-friendliness, I would say that Minecraft can range anywhere from Legoland-Innocent to Fighting-Cartoonish-Monsters-Violent. There are monsters, undead and otherwise, that live in caves and spawn on the surface at night. However, all of these can be removed from the game by changing the difficulty setting to “Peaceful.” You don’t even have to kill animals for food if you’re of the vegetarian persuasion, provided you grow watermelon and wheat.

There is no sexual content or swearing in the game, but multiplayer experiences may vary. Some servers have very lax rules and do not regulate players' language or behavior, but there are a number of Christian servers available to play on, including ours, which can be found at http://mc.ccgr.org

Occult references don’t exist in the game per se, but there is an accessible dimension called the Nether. This can only be accessed by gathering Obsidian to make a portal, which then must be lit with fire to activate, so it is entirely avoidable. It is essentially a hell realm, containing vast seas of lava and darker creatures than are found in the normal game world. Magic is also present in the game, but is only used to enchant some items and to craft potions.

This game has given me more hours of gameplay that most of my other game purchases over the last few years combined. I would actually be reluctant or embarrassed to release my total numbers of gameplay, but that is an evidence of the addictive nature of the game. It was around 20 dollars when I bought it at Alpha release—it is now around $26—and it has given me more satisfaction than most of my 40 or 50 dollar game purchases. All in all, when deciding on whether to purchase this game, consider this: if you need a structure, a plot, or even a basic structure in a game, avoid this at all costs. However, if you have an active imagination, have a mind for construction, enjoy flexibility and freedom, or even just want something to kill time, Minecraft can offer something for everyone.

Thank you, Proud Arts, for sending us a review key!

I don’t know of a game that earns the descriptor “sandbox” as accurately as Nextgen Sandbox. That’s not to say it is better than Minecraft, Breath of the Wild, Garry’s Mod, or any other game which has been given that descriptor. Any of these other games, and perhaps the Unreal engine running this one, would be a more constructive use of time. Nextgen Sandbox feels like a more true sandbox because it creates open spaces in which a limited number of objects can be banged together, often shattering one of them. The tools are simple, easy-to-use, and very limited. The main goal is the joy you find yourself. If available in Unreal as a showcase of objects and physics interactions, it would be a useful taste of what the engine can do. Since Nextgen Sandbox is standalone on a console with no ability to export creations, I don’t recommend it. Other games facilitate better destruction, and other tools facilitate better creation.

I may be unimaginative, but the main menu video clips (also found in the game’s trailer) of Nextgen Sandbox offered a fair depiction of my experience. On an infinite cobbled plane, a fence is shot with small round pellets. The wood splinters. A red barrel sits beside two brick walls near a palm tree, a trash bag, and a stack of tires. When shot, pieces of the wall break off. The barrel, of course, can be coaxed to explode, shattering the walls into individual bricks. These moments are fun enough to watch, I suppose, but none are lasting entertainment, and entering an editable world to set up brick walls myself did not enhance things much.

Nextgen Sandbox offers eight environments to place objects in, each mostly flat. The Moon environment has craters and lower gravity. The Badlands and Snowy Mountain each have hills in the expected colors. Whether the ground be sand, asphalt, or stone, there is little to look at. In one way this works in the game’s favor; most of the 115 or so objects which can be placed in each of these worlds won’t blend in with whichever environment you happen to choose, and the most fun objects might as well be placed on the featureless Grid environment for all the difference it makes. The game’s achievements encourage you to explore each environment to find easter eggs from a creepy girl to a can sitting on the ground. Less dull achievements involve using a wrecking ball and teleporting chickens: fun in their own right, but enjoyable for about the time it took to write this sentence. A bonus game is offered as the reward for clearing all objectives. This bonus is, as best I can tell, the main reason to give the game an M rating, and we will return to it later.

Placeable objects include cacti, a single door, cubes of glass, a small house, an ATV, an elephant, a freeway overpass, a bounce pad, and an unmoving sorceress. There are over a hundred other objects, but I hope this gives an idea of the randomness with which they seem to have been chosen. Some are remarkably uninteresting. The field of grain is just that, and the leaves don’t brush aside as you enter. The sorceress - and most of the other humans, for that matter - hardly responds to anything around her once placed in the world. The alligator might attack chickens, and it certainly attacks the player character when you decide to drop into the world. When the player takes damage, the screen flashes red and is outlined in blood textures. A few objects are fun, such as the merry-go-round, teleporter, and fireworks. This is from the flashing of colors more than anything about the game world itself. Movement isn’t enjoyable, not even in one of the multiple vehicles. The player can use various guns, a cannon, and a gravity gun. Since the game thinks the term “gravity gun” is common enough to use without explanation, I will say that it picks up and throws objects. That these guns, both realistic and fictitious, are boring to use is a big strike against any game’s physics system.

Nextgen Sandbox is a limited playground that is not inherently fun to play in. It has a few easter eggs outside of the achievements which are not worth scouring the environments for. Assuming the achievements are finished, though, the game unlocks a short horror game which, though buggy and very dark, I managed to finish. The game says one of the buttons turns on a flashlight; no flashlight could be turned on. The game includes a chase by a chainsaw-wielding madman; without dash, I could only walk up to a truck to attempt escape before dying. The game includes items that are not in the sandbox proper and character interactions which cannot be scripted. The horror game emphasizes how limited this game as a whole is. It includes an implied murder, a ghost, and a number of bodies inexplicably hanging from a tree, all of which, I assume, kicks the rating up to M. Much like the game as a whole, it’s a fun little diversion that seems more suited to a sample Unreal project than a finished product.

There is little to be said about the graphical fidelity or the sound design of Nextgen Sandbox. Most of the assets, I gather from the credits, might be found online from one of the many people credited by their creator handles. The controls are passable but not precise enough to click sides of walls together. The sounds and music are generic. The horror elements aren’t good, exactly, but what’s there is enough to advise that parents keep young children away from the bonus game.

Nextgen Sandbox gives you large, empty playgrounds and little to do in them. There is little in the way of production values to commend it, and other tools give more freedom and room to learn. As a stand-alone product with no export ability, I can’t recommend Nextgen Sandbox.

Thank you Keen Software House for sending us your game to review!

Space exploration is captivating, but the margin for error is tinier than a dot. Thank goodness for video games that let our inner astronaut explore the galaxies without that pesky risk. However, Space Engineers by Keen Software took a different approach - a touch more grounded approach. Now, sometimes realism can elevate a game, but it can overcomplicate and hamper the fun if overdone. I don’t usually spill spoilers here, but I think it’d be fair to warn you. With Space Engineers, you’ll be blessed just to lift off the ground. I’ve got a few things to say, most of which not good.

Before I start ranting, let me tell you what this game is all about. Space Engineers is a sandbox game. Sandbox games are basically open worlds where you can build, survive, and explore at your leisure. Consider Minecraft as a popular example. These types of games often come with multiple modes, most common of which include a survival mode and a free mode. For Space Engineers, in particular, you get modes focused either on building or surviving. There is a story mode that’s available, but trust me, it’s awful. Save your popcorn. I’ll crack that nut later. There is also a custom mode where you can develop your own challenge, but considering how open-ended that can be for criticism, I chose to just focus on the pre-set modes already offered. You’ll be glad I did too. There’s only so much negativity I should stuff in one review anyway.

Okay. Here’s how the game goes. When it comes to building stuff in Space Engineers, creative mode makes everything available to you. You will need to mine for metal ingots though for construction materials. Your handy-dandy drill is your chief tool for breaking apart rocks or asteroids for such ores. Once you’ve collected your minerals, you’ll need to process them through a machine that will smelt the ore into metal sheets, tubing, or whatever geometrical shape you acquire. The process only branches off from there, as you gradually add more processor machines to further productivity. If you made all the parts you need, you then can construct your desired structure. Then just click and hold with your welding tool and watch your solar panels, turbines, and spaceships build themselves. Of course, you can do the opposite too by scrapping the whole thing with the hacksaw. Just click, hold, and reuse the pieces as you wish. Now, I realize I made all this sound easy. Ha, ha, ha, it’s not. While I understood the concept, I couldn’t distinguish which processing machine did what, how to run it, or when it worked. Every time I clicked on one, I kept getting confused with popup screens. One window had customization options, another was inventory, and I didn’t know how they affected each other. There were no animation or sound prompts when I used them. There’s no indication if or when they did anything useful. I didn’t know how anything worked! I got so bogged down by it all, I hardly built a thing! You heard me right. The very thing I was supposed to do in this mode, I couldn’t do, and if you couldn’t already tell this did not sit well with me at all.

Unfortunately, my conga line of disappointments is just getting started. Survival mode doesn’t differ from creative mode a whole lot and somehow manages to be worse. It adds in robot enemies and makes maintaining oxygen, hydrogen, and energy levels more crucial. Plus, you’re given basic weapons like machine guns and rocket launchers. You’d think firing them would be fun then, yes? Wrong! Boy howdy, wrong! Not only do the evil bots have health-bars that soak up whole magazines, the game never tells you where to get ammo or how to reload. Okay then. Shooting from ground tanks and spaceships is better then, right? Nope! The game never fully informs you how to easily switch between weapons, and the calibration on these guns are beyond abysmal! I could set my sights dead-set on my target and my shots still hit a good six feet off. Not even Robin Hood could hit bullseyes with equipment that faulty!

And then there’s the story mode. Good grief. The story mode. Being a bore is this poor excuse for a plot’s least crime. It took the problems I mentioned before, bundles them up and adds more! Directions were occasionally unclear. A few bugs stunted my progress, and then their boss fight was the worst haphazard mess! It was so unfair and nonsensical, I believed the computer just threw it in on its own. For starters, my spaceship was bombarded by killer bots in a cramped room. Add in the fact that I’m armed with un-reloadable weapons that don’t shoot straight. Yep, I died, and whenever I died, the level wouldn’t reset! I’d just respawn! Right there! Where the exact same bots are firing! I would have no ship, no weapons. The game essentially held me hostage, locked in a no-win box. My sole escape was to delete my save file and restart the whole story again. You’d think doing that once is awful, but I ended up doing that not once; not twice; but three times! Three times, people! Three! But wait. As if this couldn’t possibly get anymore insultingly hilarious, it got worse! Once I did finally beat it, it’s lame-sauce conclusion was so pitiful and confusing, even my little sister rolled her eyes at it, and she’s more forgiving than I am! I’m sorry. I tried to stay positive. I tried, but no matter where I turned, I couldn’t squeeze an ounce of entertainment from this game. The one way I found any shred of fun in Space Engineers was by committing suicide. Yeah, suicide. I thought slamming my ship at a million lightyears per hour just to watch myself spin in a fireball of doom was a hoot. Take a moment to think about what I just said. I liked dying more than playing in Space Engineers!

This is probably gonna be my shortest review ever. I have very little else to say about this mess. Even the presentation, while well rendered, is pretty generic. Music is near non-existent. Explaining controls would require me to write a book, and moral wise, its sin counter only amounts to one use of ba****d and minimal violence. Honestly, I’m boggled just by how much this game got me to resent it. I’ve played a lot of games over the years. Some I loved. Some I liked. Some I disliked, but rarely do I hate a game this much that wasn’t technically amoral. It’s a shame. Space Engineers could have been something too, but as of right now, I can’t experience it. Why? I can hardly play the darn thing! That’s why! I thought Oriental Empires’s steep cliff of a learning curve was bad. This is a straight drop through the atmosphere while bare naked into a raging volcano bad! Sadly, I feared I was gonna have a hard time from the second I started. You see my dear readers, when the first thing a game does is prompt newbies to leave the game entirely just to watch hours worth of YouTube tutorials, there’s a huge problem. Yeah, you heard me correctly. This game did that. It encouraged me to exit the moment I entered to watch super-long tutorials. Talk about inhospitable. Their videos weren’t even that helpful anyway. I watched some and still wasted two hours just trying to run an oxygen machine.

Now, I don’t want to be that critic. You know. The grump who’s grumpy because it’s ‘cool’. I’ve got enough sense to recognize the years worth of programming it would have taken to generate anything this large. Plus, I know there are some people who found enjoyment in this game despite its shortcomings. So I tried to be reasonable. Space Engineers is somebody’s baby after all. However, I refuse to lie, and the fact is, I never got around to actually playing it. Instead, I wasted time learning how to even hit my head on a wall just so I could break it and reach the next wall and hit my head against that. I want to say a few final words to my readers before I close. To developers, please, listen to this advice I offer. Take this as from somebody who truly cares about you and wants you to succeed. If your game is so convoluted that you feel the need to outsource tutorials to make it playable, some reevaluation is in order. Mandatory YouTube videos for video games shouldn’t be a thing. To readers, if you’re in that niche club that can enjoy the density Space Engineers offers, that’s fine. I think that’s great. If you read this yet are still willing to major in Space Engineer-ology so you can build that dream spaceship, that’s swell. You do that, but I’d be off my rocket to suggest buckling up the average consumer into this rickety shuttle. I’m sorry. It’s best to ask Scotty to beam you up any other way.

Thank you Plukit for sending us this game to review!

Staxel is a game with Minecraft-like graphics designed by Plukit, and the first version was released on January 23, 2018. The game, like Minecraft, lets you create worlds, which are not infinite, but you can adjust the world size. Staxel can never really be beaten - although there is an underlying story, it is very basic. The game has a character creator which lets you adjust different aspects of your character (gender, hair color, eye color, race, etc.) and you can change it at any time from the Character Editor which can be accessed from the pause menu. Each time you create a new world you have to create a new character, however, the starting character is the last one you created.

While the game is like Minecraft, it's different because the developers made it a point to center the game around farming and village life. The graphics aren't quite the same; they're more detailed but still pixelated, and the controls revolve around right click rather than left click. Staxel focuses more on farming and responsibility, while Minecraft focuses more on survival.

After you create your character, you’re greeted by someone named Farm Fan who leads you through the basics of farming and tours the town with you. After touring the town, you get the option of choosing a cat or a dog as a pet, and you take on the responsibility of building a barn and taking care of the animals after turning in a “Farm Registration Letter.” The farm animals do poop, and the game simply calls it “Splat.” The barn needs to be built using materials that are crafted from raw wood which you receive by chopping down trees.

There is, however, a Creative Mode, where you have access to all the items in the game, and it makes it a lot easier to take care of the animals as well as the tasks the villagers want you to complete. The villagers’ tasks may want you to memorize a blueprint, and when you click to memorize it, it simply says, “Blueprint successfully learnt!” and you don’t get to see what the blueprint looks like. Every time you advance in the basic story and/or complete a villager task, in the bottom left corner it says that your journal has been updated. The journal, as far as I can tell, isn't accessible.

Villagers’ houses have wardrobes where you can change outfits using clothes that are in your inventory. Your house has one too, but it’s on a shelf so you can place it wherever you would like. The houses do have toilets, but they are treated like chairs and flush when you leave them. You can go to the town’s general store and purchase supplies that you need if necessary. As you go about your days there is a calendar on the top left showing you the season and day of that season. The game lets you do various activities, like fish or catch bugs, and you need to water your plants or they will not grow. There is, however, Magic Water, which grows a plant instantly, and there is a joke that is mentioned that the barn is haunted, but other than that the game is pretty realistic in its physics and logic.

The controls are fairly simple; they are very similar to that of Minecraft and can be customized. There is a control hint screen that can be accessed from the pause menu, and controllers are supported. Most controls are done with right click rather than left click, and, again, this can be customized to fit your playing style.

The music in the game is catchy and comes on at random times (incidentally, the music seemed to start playing at the perfect times). The soundtrack can be bought on Bandcamp for $7 an album (there is a volume 0 and a volume 1). As you move and your perspective changes, the sounds around you distort themselves as if they are changing position.

When you exit the game, there is a window that pops up where you can write feedback or bugs you’ve encountered and send them to the developer. There is a multiplayer feature, and the number of players depends on the amount of players that can be on any given server at one time. The servers are locked with a password, so random people can’t just invade the server and start griefing people, for example. There were players online on the servers, but I couldn't get into the servers due to password lock.

All in all, the game is pretty fun with lots of opportunities available to do your own thing, while keeping a safe environment as you cannot hurt anyone or anything physically. I personally enjoyed it, the story is pretty lenient, allowing plenty of room for the sandbox part of the game to flourish. I would recommend it to everyone who likes Minecraft but is looking for a sandbox alternative.

-Kittycathead

Thank you Flashbulb for sending us an Early Access review code!

TrailMakers is a game where you build vehicles and explore the planet. There are 5 modes, which are Stranded in space, TrailMakers rally, Sandbox, Danger zone, and Race island. There is multiplayer, and there are lots of people who play on multiplayer. Some games you can just go on to if you want to, but others require passwords.

In Stranded in space mode, you crash-land on an alien island and need to build a spaceship to get back home. Apparently you were delivering cargo, and you had everything you needed on your ship, but everything in your spaceship was scattered around the planet. Not only do you have to build a spaceship, but you start with a blueprint for a vehicle that can help you grab cargo. You also can add stuff to the vehicle to make it easier to do what you want it to do.

In the TrailMakers rally, you race against other players (or bots, if you like that kind of thing) in a rally, and of course, you have to build your car, too. You have some supplies, so you can make good cars. You have to be the first one to reach the finish line (as you need to this in basically any race), and if you are, you earn a good amount of money. Sadly, though, you have to pay to get to the next race.

Race Island is a mode where you build fast cars and play around them. If you join another person's game, then you can race them, and see who can make the best car. There are lots of tracks and a couple of mini-games, and they all are fun to go into and play on.

Danger zone is where you build vehicles that are fit for battle and put them to the test. There is an arena where you can fight other players in, and there are some obstacle courses. I think that it is very entertaining to go into someone else's Danger zone game and ask to battle. When your vehicle blows up, you are ejected from your seat(unless you have a special seat that doesn't do that) and you need to repair your vehicle.

Sandbox mode is a mode where you can do anything you want, and you have the ability to fly, so you don't have to take your vehicle everywhere. There are numerous mini-games and obstacles that you can go to, and lots of ramps that you can do jumps on.

The music of TrailMakers is okay, but it fits really well. The controls are good, and they are changeable. The graphics are pretty good, but there is tearing (unless you turn on vsync). I did not experience any crashes, but I there are definitely bugs. I have not crashed the game itself, but a multiplayer game has crashed.

There is no swearing or bad language in the game itself, but online, people do sometimes swear. There is no way to filter it out, and that is a problem considering that this game is supposed to be pretty family-friendly. You can destroy other people's vehicles, but the players themselves cannot die, so it isn't too big of a problem. Other than those, TrailMakers is pretty good morally.

TrailMakers is very entertaining and time-consuming, and very family-friendly. I think the only thing that Flashbulb could do to make it more family-friendly is to add a chat filter. Other than that, it is very good and fun.