Thank you Team 17 for sending us the review code!

Main Assembly is an engaging vehicle building game where you create robots and put them to the test. You play as a cute, happy drone that controls the robots that you build. When you make a bot, you can program, shape, and control it.

There are many challenges to do, and they are things like getting to the finish without being crushed, saving a bunch of fake people from a disaster, or even delivering mail. In all of these, you need to use a bot that you have created in the past, or make a new one completely. Sometimes, challenges will give you a new part to make it a little bit less difficult. The challenges are put into sections, and usually when you complete a section it also gives you a few new parts to work with.

Main Assembly has infinite possibilities, and if you are good at engineering (I’m not), you can make very useful bots that can complete the challenges way easier than any of my bots could. You can upload these creations to Steam Workshop. I would have never completed the mail delivery challenges without downloading a heavy duty forklift to carry a washing machine into a truck (that’s one of the challenges, and I could not figure out why I was tipping over the washing machine and not grabbing it using a bot that I made myself). Some people create pixel art in the form of a vehicle and upload it to the workshop, while others try to make fast cars--sometimes even re-creating cars that exist in real life!

There is online multiplayer, and in it, you can host either a sandbox game, or a bot brawl game. In sandbox, it's basically a free play mode where you can build whatever you want with infinite parts. In bot brawl, you create robots designed for battle using axes, hammers, drills, and lasers.

As of this review, Main Assembly has just came out of Early Access. Typically most of the bugs are patched before coming out of Early Access, but I still ran into a few. I was able to complete all of the challenges, but on the second-to-last level of the second-to-last section, you need to escort a minecart through a cave by destroying its obstacles. But at the very end of the level, the minecart just disappears. There is another bug where if you place two parts in the same spot, your bot will start flying uncontrollably. Another glitch that I found is that if you ram yourself into a wall fast enough, you will get trapped inside of it.

Morally, I think Main Assembly is fine, but it does have violence between robots in the Bot Brawl mode. But in this mode, the drone that you play as does not get harmed, and the bots can respawn. One thing that I found interesting and humorous, though, is that in the minecart levels, you can also save dummies that are trapped in caves, and one of their lines while trapped is this: “I’m all for social distancing, but this is a bit much.” I don’t think that is a moral issue, but I just think that you should know that it does mention the pandemic.

Main Assembly is very family friendly, and I think that anyone that enjoys engineering or racing will like playing this game.