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.

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.
Sadly, this game has a very big BAD 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 love the lowpoly landscapes, they are really beautiful.
I appreciate that the developers support my OS of choice, Linux

Worth It? WAIT FOR A SALE
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.
LIKES
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
DISLIKES
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
The Final Word
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.

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.
THE GOOD
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.
THE BAD
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.
CONCLUSION
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.

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.
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This review was written in tandem with Save or Quit.

Smooth, almost relaxing game to play at first. I began to wonder if it was too easy, then it seems to start asking you to make interesting moral choices. At one point, I made the wrong choice and the game ended. I'll be spending more time with it, there seems to be more to this world.
It did feel like it was sometimes too easy to lose track of your road and fall over the edge of the map. This isn't due to challenges controlling the vehicle at high speeds so much as just not being able to see what's over a hill, so it feels unfair/random. The punishment for losing a race hasn't been so harsh yet for it to be overly frustrating.
Runs really nicely on Linux (Ubuntu LTS, GeForce GTX1070 8GB).

Intro
Recently, I have been playing Smugglecraft, a racing video game released on May 24, 2017, by Happy Badger Studio, based out of St. Louis, MO. The game was successfully funded on Kickstarter, a common trend in the Indie game arena. The game is available on PS4 and all three flavors of PC (Windows, Mac, and Linux).
Premise
You play as a smuggler, Ferre Astraea, working to pay down a debt to a Garmuk Exto by completing various missions or smuggling contracts. This involves piloting your hovercraft through the Sideways and making critical decisions. The storyline follows two castes: the Auros and the Laborers. It takes place in the world of Dirahl, led by the controversial Auros leader, Tovan Kadmar. This post-modern societal order closely resembles medieval feudalism.
Gameplay
The mission selection screen presents the player with a variety of missions, each with varying difficulties and degrees of legality. There are also NPCs that will provide you with some background into the Smugglecraft world from both the Auros’ and Laborer’s sides.
The following different types of missions keep the player on their toes: scavenge, delivery, towing, race, pick up, and chase. Each of the missions types are somewhat self-explanatory.
The actual driving mechanics feel great. You can drive the hovercraft forward, backward, left, and right. Pretty typical, right? Additionally, you have a strafe-left and strafe-right control to quickly jump side-to-side. This is convenient for avoiding road hazards and other chaotic features of the course.
Each player will have a unique experience playing Smugglecraft. The game uses procedurally generated tracks to create each mission’s track on-the-fly. Pre-made segments of the track are combined in a random order with a random time of day and weather to create a custom feel for each mission.
You only have a limited amount of fuel, so you will need to collect white orbs along the way in order to refuel. This is reminiscent of older arcade style checkpoint games — think Wave Rider and 18 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker — where you must reach the checkpoint before time runs out.
Upon completion of some missions, you will have a choice between two options once you arrive at your destination: to fulfill the mission or to betray the mission. Choices you make will directly influence how the story unfolds.
Between missions, the player can craft new components from the credits and parts earned. This allows the player to upgrade different areas of performance for their hovercraft.
I appreciate the different game modes the game has to offer. These include Campaign, Quick Race, Multiplayer (both local and online), and Track Creator if you would like to create your own track or play tracks others have created.
Making tracks is a joy; being able to publish and share with others with such ease is great. I made a track I titled Rainy Rampage and proceeded to publish it so others can try it out. There were some challenges with the editor which I will delve into later.
Praiseworthy Points
The Premise
The story is captivating and keeps me playing to find out the next major plot point. I really enjoy the fact that the choices I make directly affect the Auros and the Laborers.
The controls are quite responsive, creating an enjoyable and engaging experience while piloting my hovercraft. Cornering does at first feel a bit floaty, reminiscent of the ships in the F-Zero series, although upgrades to my craft enhance every aspect of piloting.
I enjoyed upgrading my hovercraft throughout the campaign. The crafting mechanic is easy to grasp with the UI displaying how each piece of equipment affects the overall performance of the hovercraft. The schematics I found during missions allowed me to unlock new equipment to craft allowing even more options for customization.
I appreciate Linux support as well. I dream of a gaming world where Linux support is not a noteworthy comment to make.
The Style
The game looks so clean and minimalistic. The low-poly art style is one of my favorite things about Smugglecraft. It just looks so good and the world is quite a sight to take in. Each time of day provides a distinct color palette ranging from the morning’s golden yellows to the night’s cool blues.
I noticed the solid EDM style game music right off the bat. It is easy on the ears and provides a nice flow. While piloting your hovercraft, faster-paced music with a noticeable beat plays to instill a sense of urgency. In the menu, a chill, reflective tune plays as you select your next mission.
And the last thing is a small one, but I always get a smile on my face when the ship’s light automatically switches on with a charming, electronic sound effect in dark caves and tunnels.
Areas for Improvement
The Polish
Significantly more often than I would like to admit, there were issues with the game that pulled me out of an immersive experience. These ranged from bugged tutorials to distracting voice-overs that differed from the displayed text.
The controls were quite simple, only requiring the use of one hand. I felt that adding some control over the camera with the mouse or the second joystick when playing with a controller would be a nice addition. As it stands, the lack of camera control diminished my visibility on the track and my ability to enjoy the beautiful world.
While the UI looks great, it can be frustrating at times. One example is on the mission selection screen. While looking through available missions, you are unable to select a mission overlapping the one you currently have selected. You will need to first click away before selecting it.
Navigating to the inventory from the mission selection screen and then back generates all new missions. I could do this a few times to farm for easy missions with high payouts. I enjoy a certain amount of randomness in games, but I desire more consistency here as it seems unjustifiably random.
The Execution
I started off playing on roguelike difficulty where you must start over when you die. I quickly switched this mode off when I realized how easy it was to fall off the edge of the track and end my playthrough. This alone makes roguelike mode — something I am very inclined to play with — something that I would advise against. A clearer indicator where the edge of the track is or simply less punishment for falling off would suffice.
Missions can become repetitive and monotonous. Even tracks with the hardest difficulty did not prove much of a challenge. The pacing feels too slow considering you play as a hired hand smuggler in a world on the verge of revolution.
The Track Creator is a great idea but feels like a clunky developer tool in its current state. I would like to see the interface streamlined with more straight-forward controls. Perhaps more feedback on published tracks would incentivize players to build new tracks as well. I enjoy the competitive time trial mode and could see myself spending hours trying to outperform a previous best. A quick restart shortcut would enhance the experience.
Lastly, the name of the game sounds like an off-brand mobile clone of Minecraft trying to capitalize on its popularity. Game studios should be trying to make their games stand out, and that starts with the name.
Final Thoughts
Smugglecraft seems like an incredible game on the surface, but once you dive in it feels a bit like an early access game. I want to like Smugglecraft with all of its low-poly goodness — I really do! But the game is a bit rough around the edges.