Today, I'm gonna be talking about Robocraft- a free-to-play online game- and what I like and dislike about it.
Robocraft is a competitive online team game- two teams fight to either kill each other off, or to capture the control points. When you die, you don't respawn- you either spectate teammates until the game ends, or go back to the garage. Or at least, that's how it was when I played... I haven't actually touched the game in a few years. I know there's a gamemode where you destroy towers, and probably a few others by now, but I'll just be talking about the one I actually know.
What really makes Robocraft unique is that you create your vehicle. You unlock and buy parts using various in-game currencies, earned by playing matches, and can use them to build cars, tanks, hovercraft, airplanes and more. I really like this about the game- you go through a design process of adding armour, distributing weapons, and sometimes completely scrapping the design to try something new. Your vehicles is constantly evolving, both in terms of design and the blocks it's made of.
There are 2 problems with the game I'm gonna address (I won't talk about the matchmaking- when I tried the game a while after I stopped playing, matchmaking was abysmally slow, but I'm sure it's since gotten better)
What I personally would like to see is a game like Robocraft, but with respawning (even if it were Warthunder-style, where you have a few vehicles that can only be used once per match), and more like Space Engineers in terms of how vehicles work (needing reactors and conveyors, so that good design was even more crucial, and also having more of a focus on air/space battles).
I realise you could, to some extent, do this in Space Engineers. There are some issues though. Space Engineers doesn't have matchmaking, so you'd need to manually get all the people. You would also have to coordinate the whole control point thing somehow- or, better yet, replace it with a different objective (for instance, destroying a large, stationary vehicle). Respawning would be a bit dodgy too, since people would need to copy+paste their vehicles, and the broken remains of their old ones would stay behind. It might be difficult limiting the power of a ship- you'd have to have a rule about how many of each block people could use. There's also the problem of Space Engineers taking a few minutes to start up and load into, whereas Robocraft is very quick to start and load.
Robocraft is a really interesting game, and if it sounds like something you'd enjoy, I recommend checking it out to see if it's still any good. Hopefully in the future, somebody takes this idea and goes in a slightly different direction with it- perhaps, as I said, having more functional blocks, rather than just armour, guns and a pilot.
