Trailmakers

The game is fun, but for a paid game...why the hell is everything in the game locked behind a second paywall!?

I love weapons of mass destruction.
I used to not understand why people would sell their souls to military corporations. Sure, they earned a bit more, but the ethics and loss of life are definitely not worth it.
That's what I thought until I played this game.
I bought it for $1 on sale and loaded it into the campaign. Played it for like 2 hours, got bored, and decided to play multiplayer. I joined a random server on the list (the only one without an inappropriate name), and my views changed.
It was a deathmatch server, and since I hadn't played before, I was using a template tank. I don't know who designed these template vehicles, but I am pretty sure their goal was to never be hired by the military industrial complex. Some guy in the server had a jet that would simply one-shot any one of the template vehicles I tried to use.
So I gave up. I logged out, and in anger, I built something new. It was a helicopter wheelchair with 4 flak cannons mounted to the bottom. I was like Professor X, but not lame and thoughtful, but badass and seeking revenge. This "Gunchair" took me 2.5 hours of tinkering to get right. And it was perfect. I first tested it in some other sandbox maps. I was unstoppable. I could manoeuvre anywhere with the helicopter rotor and jets attached to my back. I could hover in place and obliterate anything and anyone below.
I was done testing on chickens. It was time for the real thing.
I logged onto a deathmatch server, and everything went as planned. I flew insanely high up, hovered above players, and nuked them out of existence. This game changed me. I had a thirst for blood, and this game quenched it. I won't be judging anyone who manufactures weapons like the gunchair again.

This is the kind of game where you are given a massive selection of various blocks, motorized parts, wheels, etc. and are told "go wild". The only limitation to what kind of machines you create are your imagination and whether or not you can make them work. And trust me, if you're willing to tinker and hone your design enough you CAN make it work. There are people who have literally made fully functional DOOM arcade machines, it's insane what you can achieve. Want to build a submarine that can hover on land and transforms into a helicopter? Absolutely. Wanna make a pickup truck that can fly in space? Yes sir, it's actually fairly easy to do. Want a realistic CIWS automated defense system complete with on-board laser targeting system? Believe it or not, YES.
Gameplay aside, I really like how active the developers are with their community. Frequent build challenges give the players a chance to show off their best work (and even a chance to be featured in the main menu as background footage!) and dev vlogs show off upcoming content, allowing players to see the new parts in action, get technical info about them, etc. Furthermore, features that get highly requested will often make it into the game, provided the team doesn't hit a roadblock with technical limitations. For example, the community has wanted tank tracks for YEARS, and it took the team 5 tries over the years to add them and they had to LITERALLY reinvent the wheel to make it happen, but make it happen they did. I'm not joking by the way, they had to rebuild the wheel system from the ground up to add them, and every wheel in the game benefited from it. But, here's that technical limitation I mentioned: people wanted *modular* tracks, but unfortunately the build menu can't do that, blocks have no way of linking up to each other like that. Each segment of the track would be its own block, which could cause problems on bigger builds. Just don't ask for a 1x1x1 cube. They staunchly refuse to add it.
Now, the game isn't perfect, so I do want to mention this:
They do often release DLC. Sometimes it might just be a few blocks and some cosmetics, other times it might just be player outfits, and sometimes it's an entire map/campaign. The game itself has a nice lineup of sandbox maps as well as 2 "campaigns", so to speak. Stranded is the much older of the 2, and is fairly simple in its style: You have a limited array of parts to build a vehicle with and you have to collect various scrap chunks and bring them to checkpoints to unlock new parts and eventually build an escape rocket to get home. No enemies, no mission system, just the challenge of collecting things in increasingly difficult locations.
Pioneers is the much newer one, and it is an ACTUAL campaign: unlock blocks through finding crates, harvest materials to actually CRAFT the blocks and increase the amount of them in your inventory (Stranded doesn't use this, you just have infinite uses of a block on any given build), and combat the robotic mining mega-corp BOTNAK as they ravage the area for resources.
There are also 2 other campaigns and a collectible-littered sandbox map in the major DLC: High Seas, an aquatic map with wind and various intensity of waves, from relaxed swells to LITERAL ACTUAL TSUNAMIS; Airborne, battling against mostly aerial space pirates; and Frozen Tracks, bringing the battle back to the BOTNAK to, once again, stop them from decimating a planet in their never-ending lust for material gain.
Now, some people may not take kindly to this approach because "drowning in DLC RAAAAHHHHHH", and while I do think some of the smaller packs like Space Voyager should've just been built-in, I also recognize that they have to make money *somehow* and this game isn't exactly a mainstream AAA title so it's not like they have some massive publisher sending them truckloads of cash on a daily basis, you gotta do what you gotta do.
In my opinion, they've earned my support because they've worked closely with their community to make an amazing game for those who have a creative itch and I'm excited to see what the next update will hold.

Dear god, the horrors you can create in this amazing game are endless.

i'm trailmaking it i'm trailmaking it so good
10/10 game i never made a trail once but thats ok
JUST STOP PUTTING EVERYTHING IN DLCS

I built a car
stablized the car
ran over chickens
jumped ramps
went through rings of fire
And went home to play trailmakers :D

DLC is overpriced and limits the creativity a lot but the game is fun in itself, though i would reccomend making DLCs less pricy, but overall i reccomend this game