Right, so having played a fair bit of World of Tanks, which is okay, as well as Minecraft which was hugely innovative back in the day, and now is the trendsetter for an entire genre, you begin to see how the two different genres can be bridged. Robocraft takes elements from both those formulas and mixes them with a little bit of DotA-style combat and base capturing mechanics.
The best part is getting to build your combat bot. You’re not limited to wheeled vehicles, although it is a solid way to go, and you can make helicopters, hover-…things and airplanes of sorts too. And naturally you can make combinations of vehicle types. Oh, and there are also insect-like legs too…
You create your design by using blocks of differing strengths, weights and armor ratings. This is the Minecraft-like element, although the blocks you use are comparably smaller to those used by the retro-survival title, and your vehicles don’t look too bad even if you can see the cubes.
Once you get your vehicle working correctly (drive, steer and stop), you can start piling on the weapons. The selection is limited at first, but with a tech tree as massive as this game has, it grows a lot as you progress.
It’s the most fun I’ve had playing a building/combat game in recent memory and even if it’s still in its early stages of development, it’s already polished enough not be annoying to play. Moreover, while you are asked for real money in order to unlock parts more quickly, you can grind your way through battles and win ingame points to do the same.
However, this is not as tedious as grinding your way up through the ranks in other games. It’s the kind of game where if you get killed on a server but your team mates stay alive, you want to watch the battle until the end to see what happens even if you can’t respawn (for that you need to join a new server).
Check out the game and tell us what you think – you can get it on Steam or just downloading it off the official site.