SmuggleCraft

I played a few different pre release versions of this game, and while I am terrible at it, it is the most fun racing videogame I have ever played. The environment is just beautiful. There is a rain effect that will sometimes appear that is gorgeous. I struggle with the handling of the hovercraft, this isn't because the controls are bad or I think there is a flaw with the game. I actually think that it is very thematic to the universe. Your starting ship is fast but with very bad handling. As you continue to upgrade your ship it becomes easier and easier to get your craft to do what you want it to do. I am also generally very bad with real time games, almost all of my favorite games are turn or puzzle based.

[b]Worth It? WAIT FOR A SALE[/b] I attempted to play this longer, but SmuggleCraft just couldn't hold my attention. While SmuggleCraft is not for me, I still think there is an audience out there who would like it, for that reason I'll give it a thumbs up on Steam. [h1]LIKES[/h1] [list] [*]The Low poly, colourful visuals [*]Lots of crafting components to customize your hovercraft [*]Hovercraft components noticeably affect stats [*]Hovercraft component designs are varied and you can make some rad-looking vehicles by mixing and matching them [*]Has keyboard/mouse and controller support [*]Tracks range in difficulty and are procedurally generated [/list] [h1]DISLIKES[/h1] [list] [*]Unexciting missions made it difficult to feel motivated to build components for my hovercraft [*]There were moments when it was near impossible to select missions using a controller [*]Some environments can be a little too bland [*]Deadzone on controller makes turning feel jerky [*]Attempts to test your moral compass, but I felt no emotional connection to the characters, making it easy to betray them for the more lucrative reward option [/list] [h1]The Final Word[/h1] The concept of SmuggleCraft sounds exciting: take on different mission types to earn credits and materials to then build various body parts for your hovercraft, altering how it handles for future missions. However, while the low poly visual aesthetic is fantastic, the gameplay couldn't hold my attention. I really wanted to create rad hovercrafts. Unfortunately, I found it difficult to grind the bland, repetitive, and sometimes boring missions in order to get the materials/cash needed to craft. Sure, some missions were more exciting than others, but I found them few and far between. Look, SmuggleCraft isn't a bad game, it's just not a game for me. You may get more mileage out of it, especially if you're looking for a more serene, casual racer with the ability to create super-rad looking hovercrafts via a neat little crafting mechanic.

There's a bunch of things I like about SmuggleCraft, the art, the color palette, both are great. The music is nice too. The controls and gameplay are kind or quirky, but not in a bad way: you control a very fast moving hovercraft, which is hard to tame. Overall, it's a solid arcade rouge like, with permadeath and crafting (you keep your upgrades after you die). You play a bunch of different missions (races, deliveries, towing, etc), which gives some variety to a game that is mostly about driving from one place to another on your hovercraft. Many people complain about the story not being good, but I love it. It's a black and white setting about an oppressive regime and a rebellion. You get to make "moral" choices, sidding with either camp, but it's not the strongest aspect of the game. Driving your hovercraft on beautiful lowpoly landscapes is. [b]Sadly[/b], this game has a very big [b]BAD[/b] thing. It's very easy to fall off the map, if you stray just a little bit from the course, you end up falling on a pit of nothingness. Now, I don't know if the game designers are flatearthers or what, but this sucks. And it doesn't seem to be a bug, but a deliberate decision. I can't stress how much I hate falling off the map, it's really infuriating. It ruins the permadeath mode for me. Other than that, this is a nice game. I [b]love[/b] the lowpoly landscapes, they are really beautiful. [b]I appreciate that the developers support my OS of choice, Linux[/b]

gameplay is repetitive yet addicting visuals and audio match perfectly I wish the story were longer ;(

Amazing!

There’s a great scene in the first Star Wars film where Han Solo boasts that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. Disregarding the fact that a parsec is a unit of distance, not time (something that has been retroactively explained with black holes (of course)), Han continues to explain how fast and badass his ship is. He comes off as cool, cocky, and like a damn smooth criminal. SmuggleCraft is a game about that feeling. It’s a game about building and managing your ship, shipping contraband and feeling like a chaotic neutral smuggler. Unlike Han Solo, however, the player runs his or her business on a barren, rocky planet full of the kind of empty space for which people would build really fast vehicles. It’s all designed with this pastel low-poly aesthetic, with just enough detail as you speed through the environment to an excellent chill synth soundtrack. SmuggleCraft starts you out indebted to a local merchant, who helps you off the ground with your hovercraft. With that, you need to get to work, because he’ll be needing payment by tomorrow. Of course, you could refuse to pay him, if you’re willing to deal with the bounty hunters he’ll sic on you while you work. So you run odd jobs for the locals, of varying legality. They’ll reward you with credits or parts, both of which are used to upgrade your ship. These jobs are usually some form of A-to-B drive, sometimes A to B to A, or even the occasional race. With some of these, you can return the goods you were sent with, or grift your employer and sell them to someone else if they offer a good deal. You might also start to get the heat on your tail if you take too many less-than-legal jobs. All of these little quirks fill out the roleplay to a great extent. You start thinking like a smuggler. On the quest screen, you can talk to locals (who, I will be frank, look pretty bad aesthetically), who range from young kids telling you they look up to you to people who just straight up tell you, “You’re a bad person.” For a game with little-to-no “actual” world, it’s filled with flavor. But when you’re out of the quest screen, you’re on the road. And there is a lot of road in SmuggleCraft. A lot of empty road. The game is randomly generated, as many games are now, and this is probably SmuggleCraft’s biggest flaw: the maps generated are boring. The racing itself is highly simplistic, too. There are customizable ship parts, but they don’t seem to change much mechanically. There’s fast, and faster; the upgrades are really linear, as well. The majority of the gameplay is spent holding down accelerate and guiding the control stick a little to the left or a little to the right so you can hit a boost or grab some energy for your ship. Within thirty minutes, I was already bored with the driving. The maps are big and barren and have a large set of little sections recurring in different orders. Occasionally, I would encounter a new segment, but they all played the same. Honestly, I wanted the bounty hunters or the police to get on my tail so it would give me something to actually do on these maps. The core gameplay is so boring and so nothing that it totally took me out of my wonderful Giraud-style fantasy world and reminded me I was using a controller. SmuggleCraft is a good start. It feels like it’s in Early Access. I was more than ready to get wrapped up in its fantasy fulfillment, but it took me right out of it with its bland maps and simplistic gameplay. I seriously believe the game would have benefited from a set of handcrafted levels, a dedicated campaign, or maybe some form of combat, or just anything to give this driving more depth than it has right now. Because right now, there’s a lot of road, and not enough rubber to hit it with. --- This review was written in tandem with [url=http://saveorquit.com] Save or Quit. [/url]

No fullscreen option and there's an incredible graphical glitch which consumes the entire map with black void. I used the minimap to easily win races. This game is garbage, it's like something I would make.

SmuggleCraft has some great ideas, good core gameplay, and a really neat vibe that all somehow get wrapped up in an underwhelming package. It can be extremely satisfying and enjoyable at some times, and then just 5 minutes later you might be extremely annoyed at the fact that a little polish could've made everything so much better. [h1][b]THE GOOD[/b][/h1] The game has a super cool premise where you're a rogue space smuggler who places trust in nothing except your trusty hovercraft, freely bouncing between alliances as you do work for whoever pays the most so that you can pay your debts and keep bounty hunters off your trail. Delivering goods, towing equipment, chasing down targets, and taking part in illegal street races are all the order of the day. You can spend your cash and parts to craft new equipment for your hovercraft, making it faster and stronger along the way. There's branching storylines, multiple endings, and you can even choose to play the game as a roguelike with permadeath or as a regular game that will let you try again when you fail (protip, play it as a roguelike; the game excels at really making you feel like a space smuggler, and the constant threat of losing it all really drives it home). Solid anti-grav driving physics and a very good aesthetic/presentation are complimented with a chilled-out downtempo electronica soundtrack and random track generation. The game has a very distinct feel to it overall, and it makes you want to get lost in the world that it creates. [h1][b]THE BAD[/b][/h1] The overall lack of polish makes it hard for that to happen. Mediocre sound design and a nagging feeling of repetitiveness are the least of the game's problems. There's serious issues with how the game handles the menu's interaction with a controller; for example, when Garmuk Exto asks you for money, the menu gives you the option of pressing A for yes and B for no. Pressing any button at all will choose the "no" option, even if you hit A. Using a controller is reccommended for a game like this because it gives you more precise control over your steering inputs, so it sucks when after every level you have to put your controller back down just to navigate the menu. Sometimes when you beat the game, the menu music and the credits music will play at the same time. I could go on...overall, SmuggleCraft feels like an early-access game that hit 1.0 far too early. These problems aren't totally game breaking, but they're big enough to be worth noting. [h1][b]CONCLUSION[/b][/h1] SmuggleCraft is the kind of comfy game that's great for killing some time on a lazy Saturday night. It has tons of charm and replay value, but it has some glaring imperfections to go along with it. It's worth spending a few bucks for on sale, but the full price might be asking a little too much of you. Go in with low expectations and you'll enjoy it a lot more.

Overall SmuggleCraft is a nice little game, it has a simple objective and kept the scope of what it was trying to achieve small, so that it could do what it wanted to do effectively. Often indie games fall into the trap of trying to do too much with too little, but this game really benefits by doing a few things and doing them well. I think it's a really fun game and worthy of being in anyone's Steam library. Pleas check here for the full review - https://youtu.be/SXrMOJW0gFg

If you like racing, customization of your own hovercraft, and a dope story, give this a shot. Also, split screen local multiplayer. What's not to like