Launching in early access today is Main Assembly, the debut game for Bad Yolk Games – a robot sandbox that encourages getting creative and playing around with your productions. The game is being published by Team17, and is available on Steam right now.
Although not yet a household name, the team at Bad Yolk has experience working on franchises such as Gears of War, DOOM, Wolfenstein, The Division, Just Cause, Syndicate, and Bulletstorm. Main Assembly’s a bit of a change of pace from those epic AAA blockbusters, but it’s not too different from successful games like Flashbulb’s Trailmakers and from our time with Main Assembly we can safely say that if you liked Trailmakers, you’ll like this one as well.
Some affinity for creativity and engineering is certainly welcome, as you can craft mechanical marvels of all shapes and sizes. You can go a similar route to Trailmakers and create all sorts of driving or flying vehicles, or go in a very different direction and make one of those creepy robot spiders that others will certainly think is a spy drone.
Depending on your creation, you can also take it out for some multiplayer fun – the most striking example of this being a battle of kart racers that takes place online with self-made vehicles. If you prefer more objective-driven gameplay, then you can also try to tackle the game’s various challenges, each tailored to make use of a certain kind of engineering and programming. It’s a nice break from all the creation and destruction that is at the game’s core, which is very sandbox-oriented.
How your creation behaves isn’t pre-defined either (unless you download something from the workshop). You can tweak how your robot moves and behaves using a visual programming interface, which is designed to make you feel like an accomplished engineer even if you haven’t had any formal training whatshowever.
As always, the success of titles like this will largely depend on how the community takes to it and if its Steam Workshop support is going to result in a ton of creations for people to play around with and modify to their liking. One to keep track of while it’s in Early Access – you can check it out here.
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