Robocraft - 5/20 hours

Because of my ridiculous blunder in the last post, I am going to try and make it up to Robocraft by saying only positive things about it.

The damage system is pretty neat. Your robots are composed of several pieces of equipment, held together by blocks. As you get hit, you lose blocks from your robot, in the locations the hits are suffered (you can also lose equipment directly, but it tends to be tougher than your standard blocks). This adds an interesting layer of strategy to the fights. You can aim for specific systems on the enemy bot in order to try and take out their weapons or movement, and it is often wise to position your own robot so that the less vulnerable areas get shot first.

This also ties in with robot construction more generally. Robocraft operates with a physics simulation, so if your robot is lopsided, it will lean. If you lose your front wheels, you have to go in reverse, dragging the useless half of your robot behind (in front of?) you. It's not the tightest simulation out there - I once saw a legged mech get sheared in half and then hop around on one foot blasting with its remaining laser arm, but the way I see it, its looseness allows for some memorable stories and  keeps the game from grinding to a halt every time someone loses a single wheel.

I also enjoy going into the factory section and seeing the robots other people have built. They are all much too expensive for me to buy with my limited resources, but it's still fascinating to see what other people have done with the game's creation tools. It's like a mechanical, less interactive version of Spore.

So, you know, there are things I unabashedly enjoy about this game. It's not all complaining about the economy or whining because I'm bad at team death matches. You'd probably expect me to mention the fun of building robots (and it is fun) as part of the positives, but I have some reservations about the construction system, so I'll wait for a post that isn't meant to be purely complementary to talk about it.

That being said, I was able to construct a massive octohedral robot that fired healing beams and was nearly impossible to destroy (despite moving like what it was - a 4 story tall 8-sided die with jet engines strapped to it.) I called it the Octohealdron and it was the highlight of my day.