Not to be confused with singing synthesizers, Volcanoids is a survival and crafting sandbox in early entry, and wait, no – the place are you going? This one is completely different, I swear. Volcanoid Studio skip the boring ‘caveman’ components and begins gamers out assembling a Jules Verne-esque tunnelling land-ship. Once your vessel is ship (and drill) formed, you’re off to battle a military of magma-fuelled steampunk robots which can be attempting to defeat humanity by inflicting volcanic eruptions. It’s nonetheless early days but for the game, however this preliminary launch has me unusually excited. Check out the launch trailer beneath.
I’ve solely had a couple of minutes to mess around with Volcanoids, however its tactile mechanical crafting programs jogged my memory a little bit of Factorio at first. Gather steel ore, chuck it into the best machines, hit the buttons and out pops SCIENCE! Relaxing, proper up till the primary volcanic eruption. The game instructed me to cover in my preliminary residence base – an armoured submarine – however as an alternative I stayed above decks to see what would occur. Boom – the world shakes and an infinite cloud is blasted excessive into the air. And then an enormous tsunami of super-heated mud begins rolling throughout your entire island. I slammed the door of my sub shut simply because the wave was about to hit.
Stepping exterior a couple of moments later, I discover your entire island coated in ash, bushes stripped naked. Hell of a strategy to make the stakes clear, and provides me a superb motive to wish to combat again. It helps that I’ve already received myself a sawn-off shotgun and a pile of ammo, however I’m already keen to assemble up the steel and coal wanted to gas my industrial ambitions. It’s time to construct myself a grinding, churning conflict machine and go hunt some robots. Judging by the trailer, the enemies have their very own tunnelling land-ships too, reminding me a bit of the traditional (and never almost imitated sufficient) Carrier Command.
My preliminary impression is that it is a game extra involved with motion and lightweight technique than making crafting and building a very finnicky course of. I bear in mind bouncing off From The Depths (one other mechanically minded sandbox) because it wished me to assemble my ship from the essential blocks upwards, proper right down to assembling my very own engine by hand. This is a game the place you determine what number of engines you need, stuff them stuffed with coal and journey off into the ash-dimmed sundown looking for your pyroclastic foe.
Yes, you steer the ship by smashing these massive chunky buttons.
Right now, the game is fairly bare-bones, however apparently playable from begin to end – assemble your ship, progress by means of the island and beat the robots on the coronary heart of the island. Volcanoid (a mere three-person group) reckon there’s at the very least one other two years of labor but to be accomplished. Right now the game is single-player solely, however the prime options on their improvement roadmap are on-line co-op and PvP multiplayer, adopted by a reworked quest system and a closing boss combat within the volcano core. There’s new tech and weapons but to return, and plenty extra moreover. See the full, detailed roadmap here.
Volcanoids is out now in early entry. You can grab it here on Steam for £15.49/€16.79/$19.99. The builders plan on elevating the value as they add main options like multiplayer and PvP.
