Trailmakers

[Whiskey_chaser]

 

My kid has been crazing me to install Fortnite and Kerbal Space Program. He's only six so it's a flat no on Fortnite and Kerbal looks a little too complex but I stumbled on this over the weekend and it's proved to be a massive hit.

 

The premise is simple - build vehicles using a load of parts you unlock in an adventure mode to overcome obstacles. This is done by a really intuitive building tool that snaps bits together like lego. As you can imagine, the internet is there to showcase some amazing models that put our crappy eight wheeled buggy with a jet engine on the back to shame.

 

You can delve pretty deep into some of the mechanical parts, assigning hot switches and tweaking suspension settings if you like and the physics based nature of it means things can go comically wrong. Both my kids have now been making cars out of lego that we can recreate in the game to try out.

 

It's early access but there's plenty of game there already and it runs solidly. There's an adventure mode, sandbox mode, racing and online multiplayer alongside a load of daily challenges.

 

 

[Cyberpunk]

I've been playing this as of late. I got it cheap as part of a bundle at sometime, and decided to give it a try after coming across a video on YouTube. I'm only playing the single player campaign, but having fun with it. 

The basic premise of the single player story is you are an astronaut of sorts, and the only crew on a massive cargo ship. Your ship runs into a meteor storm, and breaks up, jettisoning you and it's cargo onto a nearby planet. So now you're on the planet surface, and your computer tells you that in order to get back into space, you must build a ship using the cargo that's landed on the planet. And you have to collect the cargo using vehicles you build. Every time you successfully collect a piece of cargo, it unlocks another part or Lego block type thing for you to use in building stuff to help you 

The game give you basic plans for some vehicles, but let's you build your own, or modify the games vehicles. You start off with a basic car with two Lego blocks on the front, and all you can do is push the found cargo. You have to find more parts to make better vehicles. 

As you travel and look for cargo, which looks like glowing golden rocky shapes, you unlock more collection points, meaning you don't have to travel so far with your cargo to get it processed. Luckily, as you approach the glowing rocky cargo, your computer tells you which part it is. 

I had a breakthrough the other night. I had a massive round rock, and I spend ages trying to bulldoze it to a collection point. I had power, as I'd found some engines. But it didn't have traction, as the cargo was in mud. But I wanted it, as the computer said it was spiked tyres. Yes, the part I couldn't move was the part that would let me move it. So an hour went by, I made bigger vehicles, but they all were just variations on bulldozer with big side bars to stop it rolling away. And somehow managed to manhandle it to the collection point. Yay, spiked tyres at last. This opens up the game for me, as with better traction, I quickly found a diving bell, and a tractor beam, making it easier to handle cargo, and giving me the ability to make a submarine of sorts to look underwater.