Volcanoids seems like a impolite sickness it’s essential purchase cream for, however you’re too embarrassed to ask the girl within the pharmacy as a result of she is aware of your mum and though your mum has seen you in each state of undress and infirmity you continue to can’t let her know you’ve bought Volcanoids since you’re a grown-up for heaven’s sake, you’re a grown-up, why is every part so troublesome. Hello, I’m Brendan. Steve can’t do Premature Evaluation this week, so I’ve been taking part in this singleplayer steampunk survival game. It’s fiery and messy and nonetheless wants a little bit of therapy.
You’re a lad from an island which has been taken over by volcano-loving steambots. Your job is to take again management of the island by discovering precisely out what’s inflicting all of the current volcanic eruptions, and put a cease to it. These volcanoes aren’t simply spicy flavouring both, there’s a timed eruption each 20 minutes that covers the island in mud. After an eruption, the world turns into a gray ash-filled place, and it solely returns to its former inexperienced state over time. If you’re caught within the blast, you die, game over.
Much of your time is spent within the recent air on the floor, mining copper and coal deposits for base supplies because the clock runs down. But when this volcano countdown timer reaches its final minute, you’re warned to take cowl. That means climbing aboard your beginning submarine and shutting the hatch, or higher but, moving into a giant “drillship”.
This ship is a transferring base. It can’t be pushed precisely, there’s no wheel to spin or windshield to wipe. Instead you utilize a machine to select from 37 completely different factors on a map, then pull a lever marked “travel”. Or if you wish to bury your ship on the spot with out re-surfacing wherever, you pull a lever marked “go down”. This is beneficial for fast escapes from impending eruptions, burrowing into the bottom like a giant steel snake. Otherwise, it’s a giant toasty community of stops buried in a glowing, lava-filled island. Like the Central line on the London Underground, however not that heat.
Still, it feels thrilling to have a base that strikes round, and there’s that acquainted DIY pleasure of constructing workstations and doorways in precisely the spot that appears best for you, arranging your new house in accordance with the maxims of survival game feng shui. The lockers in right here shall include coal and copper and sulphur, it’s the fundamental carriage. The lockers over there shall include restore kits and different mechanisms, as a result of it’s the engineering carriage. This feeling of making your personal house is highly effective and unmistakeable. If a survival game can get this proper, it has promise.
There’s additionally a periscope. Sweet. This helps you to look out upon the panorama earlier than surfacing. But the childlike pleasure of this machine is weakened whenever you realise the remainder of the world is pretty barren and skeletal. The solely factor to test for by your periscope is similar few baddies, all of which can be rapidly dispatched by your ship’s turrets as quickly as you floor (you’re taught learn how to construct these turrets inside the first hour). So the novelty of checking your environment by the periscope (or watching the volcano explode from the protection of the grime) quickly wears off whenever you realise there isn’t a lot to concern from heading topside.
Part of me hoped that this may do for the lava degree what Subnautica did for the water degree. But it’s clearly not fairly there but. Aside from lava swimming pools and caves (extra on this in a minute) there are some villages with shoddy wanting homes to discover. You can’t enter any of the buildings, nonetheless, and lots of the homes function a entrance porch that’s both clippily buried within the floor or floating mysteriously above it.
There are loads of extra jarring bugs, together with game crashes and enemies clipping by mounds of earth. In one occasion, I fell by the jagged geometry of an underground cave right into a smaller, worse cave. There was no escape besides to re-load. This is early entry, sure, we have been warned, blah blah blah, however there’s a roughness right here that typically takes the biscuit. With many early entry misadventures, you’ll be able to lock away in your thoughts that it is a work-in-progress. The worst bugs will typically take time to unintentionally uncover. Here, the roughness is palpable. It typically feels such as you’re within the studio, doing high quality assurance.
Anyway, these villages will typically have a brand new half that you may carry again to analysis, which improves the equipment on board your soiltrain. But more often than not your outings are searching for the identical three parts: coal, copper, sulphur. Your refinery makes powder from uncooked sulphur, which it’s essential make turret bullets and shotgun shells. Your complete ship is powered by coal. And copper is required to make the bolts, plates and tubing obligatory for nearly every part.
You can construct “breach” kits to patch up a damaged wall within the ship. Or ground items and ladders that may create additional ranges in your roomier carriages. But all of it comes all the way down to gathering these assets and establishing manufacturing queues. Yes, that previous hierarchy of matter is right here too, ruling over every part with an iron fist (then a metal fist, then a diamond fist). This isn’t actually a nasty factor. It simply feels very restricted within the present construct, to not point out overly acquainted.
So that’s the game. You journey round map, searching for fossil fuels and different gear, upgrading your ship alongside the best way. There can also be your mission to repair the over-heating island. This entails going to enemy-controlled caverns in several components of the island. It seems steampowered lasers are inflicting the eruptions. Which means descending into the robots’ caves and assaulting the lasers themselves.
Sadly, these subterranean raids are boring demolition jobs that contain spamming a couple of grenades at bits of equipment till there aren’t any extra bits of equipment. There nonetheless appears to be just one species of robo-foe, they usually’re neither a problem nor are they very enjoyable to kill. A single headshot together with your shotgun. I’ve seen a green-coloured model of this bot, which suggests there are extra, colour-coded for toughness. But this doesn’t shake fight up past making you reload extra typically.
The robots run round of their caves in pairs or trios, not likely being attentive to something, till they spot you and open fireplace. There are additionally very annoying enemy turrets. To blast these you principally must pop out and in of canopy, taking potshots and throwing grenades till the mounted gun is blown up. It’s tedious, uninspired FPS non-design. The caves themselves are huge, largely empty areas spattered with sulphur so that you can mine when you end your laser destruction job early. And you’ll want that sulphur to refine into powder to make extra bullets to fill your shotgun to shoot extra baddies to…
And there it’s: the second that arrives with each survival game in the end. “Why am I doing this again?” With Volcanoids it got here to me particularly quick. Why was I mining this sulphur? To go on one other one in all these raids? It’s not very inviting. Volcanoids has an attention-grabbing premise, the thought of preserving a large drill practice in good nick on a always exploding island. Super. But that concept nonetheless solely exists right here in nuts and bolts. If you’re on the lookout for one thing to assuage that survival game itch, this isn’t but the ointment for you.
