Robocraft - 2/20 hours

Imagine a building game that was purposefully hobbled by wedding it to the worst part of a collectible trading card game, and then use that as the basis for a serviceable, but bare-bones action game. That's Robocraft.

Building your own robots is cool, but Robocraft doesn't give you the parts right away. It doesn't even (necessarily) give you the parts eventually. Instead. you get loot boxes from playing online and the loot boxes contain a random assortment of parts and those you use to build your robot. You can break down your unneeded parts for an in-game currency and then trade that currency for different parts, but the exchange rate is not favorable, and you can only get parts of the first two rarity levels that way. That's right, parts come in rarity levels, like in trading card games, and the "epic" and "legendary" parts you can only get through random chance.

It's the exact opposite of what makes building games great. Keep in mind, I like crafting games that make you unlock recipes and force you to build the tools to build the tools for end-game content. In fact, that's the very reason I've allowed Starbound to so thoroughly distract me as of late. However, the difference here is that in a more conventional crafting game, you can make a plan about how to get the really good stuff. In Robocraft all you can do is ceaselessly grind away in the hopes that the parts you need drop by chance. It strikes me as a massive waste of time.

But I guess that's free-to-play for you. Although I'm not sure that spending real money would be all that much of a help. As near as I can tell, the only way to spend money on this game is to get a "premium membership" which doubles the amount of items you get from lootboxes and gives you a better exchange rate for recycling parts. Thus even if you give Robocraft your money, it's still a random grind-fest where you hope the gods of chance give you the parts to make a cool robot.

And those gods are not kind, I can tell you. One of the epic rarity parts I got was an aircraft wing. A single aircraft wing. The game is unkind enough to force you to double grind for things that naturally and exclusively come in pairs. Under most normal circumstances, this would be sufficient for me to uninstall and never look back.

But I am committed here. So I'll keep playing. It probably won't be too bad. Despite my complaining, it really is a hoot to build a robot piece by piece and then drive it around. I just wish there was something more interesting to do with it than team arena deathmatch. Yes, battle bots are one of the main robot archetypes, but it just feels perfunctory to me, like they didn't bother to build a game around their CCG-esque crafting system and just offloaded the work of creating a challenge to their players. That's likely the main downside to the free-to-play model. There's just not enough incentive to polish the parts of the game that don't make any money.

CORRECTION: I was mistaken about the in-game shop. You can buy epic and legendary parts with the regular in-game currency. This mitigates a big complaint I have about the game (and man, do I feel like a fool for overlooking the purple and gold items in the big list), though it does make its lootbox-driven economy all the more baffling. Why not just give players a budget in currency and allow them to build based on that? Why make people go through the process of breaking down their useless parts to afford the ones they really want? I have an uncomfortable feeling that Robocraft is trying to pull something here, but seeing as how I was so clearly wrong about something ridiculously simple, I am going to withhold judgement.