Do you love games where you will have to build a vehicle, put some lovely weapons on them and just go out and start destroying others? Well, then Last Level and SOFF Games have the game for you: Steamcraft. The game is very, very similar to Crossout but it has a more steampunk kinda look which provides a bit of a different feeling. In Steamcraft you will battle to dominate on beautifully designed maps, level up and get even stronger. But in the end, the question is whether the world needs another game like this, or have the developers of Last Level and SOFF games wasted their time? I checked it out for you!
- Maps: The design of the maps that you will encounter are just beautifully done and will blow your mind! Even the smallest details are there, for example when you are on the snow map, there is a lot of ice in the middle which is literally slippery. In the first few rounds that I played, I just lost because I was driving around and enjoying the view. Well, of course until an enemy spotted me and just destroyed me.. damn bastards!
- Information: Right from the start when you first launch the game, you will immediately notice that there is a spot on the tutorial that will show you the ins and outs of the battle and makes you familiar with the controls. Even when this part is over and you find yourself in the main menu, a girl will appear, and she will guide you throughout all the options. While some of you guys are most likely to skip this, it can come in handy when you start building your own car. I had been struggling for about an hour to build one and went into battle to find out it was shit (yes, I skipped the building part of the tutorial).
- Game modes: The game has six different game modes that you can play. All of them being classic game modes that you will find in the majority of games like capture the base, team deathmatch, skirmish, deathmatch, attack/defence and king of the mountain. When you just start playing, you won’t have access to all of them, which is nice for the higher level players. Some game modes just require a little bit more experienced/skilled players and well, I can imagine they don’t wanna play a game with noobs.
- Vehicle building: In Steamcraft, you have the ability to build your own car or to edit a pre-built one. However, this can be really tricky sometimes. When you follow the tutorial, you will learn about the basics but there isn’t really an in-depth guide on how to develop the perfect car. What I for once experienced as frustrating, is that you can’t place the blocks the way you want it. You will always have to follow a certain path, which affected me in a way that I just simply stopped paying attention to it and just started playing with the standard given cars.
- Guns: There are a couple of different guns that you can build onto your vehicles like machine guns, rocket launchers, tesla’s and a couple more. And while you grow in level, they will get stronger and you can upgrade them to better ones. But where it seems nice to have a lot of different weapons in your car, when you fire them, only one will shoot and they will all rotate after a bullet is fired, so in the end it doesn’t matter if you have six nice guns or just one, the fire rate will stay the same. And the worst part is when you find this out in a game. I thought let’s put seven onto my car, and yet again it ended badly.
- Crossout rip-off: If you are a gamer, you might know the game Crossout. Well, it is safe to say that Steamcraft is heavily inspired by it, well I think we can go even further and just say Steamcraft is a total rip-off of Crossout. The only thing that is missing is the story like game mode, but furthermore, everything is almost identical. Steamcraft has a steampunk kinda look, which makes it feel different, but in the end, you can call it the same game.
- Spider: So the game is about killing other cars with yours, sounds easy enough. For some reason, the developers decided to add one-hit spiders to it. When your vehicle is almost destroyed, you can press a button where you will turn into a spider, and just run towards the enemy and blow yourself up. This feature just simply sucks. It has nothing to do with the car vs car battles and just ruins the game experience.
- Controls: Even though the controls get explained perfectly fine and you just know what to do, they can feel a bit buggy and laggy. While driving around, you sometimes just lose grip where it shouldn’t happen, or you just start spinning while driving straight forward. Okay, maybe it also requires a bit of skill to have a perfect control but I can imagine that players will stop playing because of this because it just gets really annoying.
CONCLUSION
Score: 65%
While games like this are fun to play, and Steamcraft definitely is a good title, it still has its downsides with a major one being a total rip-off. However, the quality of the game is good, and if the developers keep updating it and make it more unique, it can be a fantastic game. They already did show that they have the skills for it when you look at the design and implementing the different game modes. So, just like you have to do with the cars, the developers also need to keep developing the game.
Developer: Last Level, SOFF Games Publisher: Last Level
Played on: PC
Perfect for: When you want to design your own car and take out others
Steam game store link: click here