I know I complain a lot but I really can’t grasp my head around sandbox games. If you find these things fun idk you need a better personality (said affectionately if you’re on lemmygrad and enjoy these games lol)

Stormworks is a game where you build intricate vehicles in land sea and air and then take them out for a spin. My problem is not with the creative aspect, but with the “gameplay” they tried to put around that. I love trying out these super complicated sim games, e.g. kerbal space program or stationeers, and usually I play them for a few hours, realize it goes way over my head, and leave it to the pros. That’s not what I have a problem with.

Stormworks was underwhelming. It’s not the building aspect that’s a problem either, it’s literally everything else they put on top of it.

The game gives you a starter boat. This starter boat will float away if you don’t take the time to rope it every time you park it in your dock. Having a dock with a closable door is not something they thought of apparently (the land portion of the dock is closable, but not the sea part). Ask me how I know that happened? It happened to me. I had to restart the game because I didn’t have enough money to order a new boat. I wouldn’t mind the boat floating away but this game has no failsafes in place to prevent a complete and total defeat.

Then I go to a mission to make sea repairs on a stranded boat. I get on top of it to inspect the damage (at night, because missions like spawning at night) and… it immediately sinks at the bottom of the sea. To be honest that was more funny than anything else, even though I wasted a very boring trip.

I finally get a mission to go get 3 stranded capsize victims to a hospital, great. That’ll pull in some money. I make my way there and because of a DLC some helicopters start shooting at me. Like bruh I just started the game lol. I try turning off the lights, reducing my footprint, but it doesn’t seem to prevent them from shooting at me. Thankfully they don’t have great aim and I make my way to the victims, putting them into my boat (you have to manually carry each one, they will not help you in any way getting into your boat). I get them in and realize a hospital boat is closer than the hospital I originally was aiming for, so I turn to the huge ship. Hey, it’s more interesting than just driving in a straight line for 10 minutes. I get side by side with the hospital ship and try to go get my rope to tie my boat to it when I fall into the sea - because the starter boat is not wide enough and so you need to jump in a weird spot to get from the back (where the helm is) to the front where the rope is.

Guess what? I can’t catch up with my boat that is still moving forward. The capsize victims in the meanwhile just sit there on my boat, not doing anything to help. As I desperately and futilely swim behind my boat, never catching up to it, I realize the hospital boat is slower than I am. So I aim for the right moment and grab its ladder. Then, I pull myself up on the bridge, running towards the front - it’s faster than swimming. Just as I catch up with my boat… it capsizes too, because it got caught in front of the hospital ship and did a weird turn or something.

Well, at least I caught up to it. I jump back in the sea, fail to catch the boat (I think that’s a physics thing in how the speed of the hospital ship was transferred to me), and then realize I’m missing one injured. Their head was underwater too long and instead of being automatically ejected from their seat, they instead decided to drown. I catch up to the helm, frantically get in place so I can try to salvage this shitshow, and… nothing. I knew that was going to happen, but eh. You gotta try anyway. Obviously my motors are underwater and can’t get oxygen, so the boat is just lost.

So anyway that’s when I quit the game lol. Trying to save my mission and boat for 5 minutes only to end in absolute failure state, no chance of saving. Looking it up online, the only solution when you capsize is to drown yourself so you spawn back at base, and then build a towing boat. Or, and I had a good chuckle at this, swim back to your starter island. Sure, I’ll just waste 40 minutes of my real life pressing W in one direction. That seems like a great time that I definitely could not spend better somewhere else (spoiler alert: just make an “I’m stuck” button and save players the waste of time). On top of which I don’t have any money because half the missions the game generates are missions I can’t do with my simple starter boat, so my game is just fucked for a second time and it’s a campaign restart (unless I wanted to swim around to collect loot crates that give 10k$ but see my previous sentence).

And the game auto saves all the time so it’s very likely that I had no save before the capsizing. I didn’t feel like trying a load anyway as I figured I’d just keep running into more problems. When my boat disappeared god-knows-where I had no idea of knowing where it was (there’s no map tracking) and the game had just saved as I got into the hangar.

My screed would end before it even began if these problems were reflected somewhere, but no! Everybody loves this game! from the subreddit to the steam reviews, you’d think this tech demo is the most complete game to ever grace the world. I think people who actually play more than a few hours in this are people who just play sandbox and build a fleet of vehicles. Nobody plays this for career mode.

If you enjoy the creative aspect of building complicated vehicles and seeing how they perform that’s not my issue either, my issue is how these games add a career or campaign mode, and then do nothing with it. But I want them to do something with it! I would love that game if there was an actual career mode like the one they make you think is in there. The broader problem beside game-breaking bugs is that usually in these games, there’s not really a reason to keep going. Make more money so you can build bigger vehicles but for what? At that point you should just play sandbox and skip the grind from the get-go.

I had the same problem with aviassembly; reviews rave about how great that game is, and then you play it and it’s barely a prototype. My problem is not the arcade flight simulations (you can apparently fly a plane that’s just a tube), it’s that there’s barely anything in there. Missions in that game are always the same repetitive go here, grab this, go there and the landscape is ugly to look at; there’s no unique monuments or areas, there’s just low-poly textures. Also I’m sorry but the steam video is just lying about that game. You have no reason to ever make a biplane, there is no such thing as crashed wrecks, you never get out of your plane to carry boxes into it, you don’t deliver mail, and the rest of the video is conveying something that’s technically in the game, but definitely not the same experience.

I have a very simple principle when it comes to game design: the player (not the character) should never be idle. If I alt tab to do something else while I wait to travel to a place, you’ve failed something somewhere. It was one of my issues with Kenshi too. At least aviassembly avoids that by making distances very short; you barely have time to reach cruising altitude before you have to prepare for landing.

The reason I’m so critical of stormworks is because, well, I need to tell someone lol (the capsize rescue was a whole odyssey I’ll give them that), but also because I want to like these games! I love the idea behind stormworks of having different ways of making money with vehicles you build yourself, setting up automated revenue, buying up more islands, and I don’t know what else they have. It’s just I’ll never experience it because your career mode is so punitive (whereas the creative mode is, by definition, only rewarding - go figure). If you make a game for creative builders then make that, don’t slap on a half-assed ‘campaign’ to sell copies to unsuspecting players.

I enjoyed trailmakers recently, that game is definitely between arcade and sim. And at first I loved the setting of the campaign mode, on a planet of frogkin where you start with a shitty land vehicle, upgrade it to solve organic challenges, then move to sea vehicles… but then you realize, oh, that’s all there is to it. Make one passable vehicle and just play with that the whole time. Then you move to tier 2 which is the sea area, then tier 3 which is the air area. The campaign is pretty much over before it even began - though with the DLCs I see there’s also a space campaign and a third one too iirc.