Trailmakers

Nearly five hours in, and I've:
-Built a battleboat
-Fought against some players with it (all parties willing, of course)
-Raced jets across the sky
-Dove into the sea with a pretty nifty sub
-Raced some rallies and won a few
And now I'm working on my amphibious yacht...
All in all, it's a very fun game so far. You remember that feeling you got when you were blissfully building away with your Lego set?
I had that the entire time I was building, plus the added glee of knowing I would get to DRIVE it after too. There's a few issues that I've found so far, but being its early access I expected as much.
Pros:
-Its a better lego builder than actual Lego builders (imho)
-Vehicle handling is really nice (except airplanes, though that might just be me)
-Builder mechanic feels... I dunno, snug would be my choice of word
-The bump function in the builder is a godsend
-Sandbox world is pretty big
-Decent graphics/pleasant art style
-Respawn mechanic/change map spawn location is pretty dang seamless
-So's the repair function
-Weapons feel real nice too
Cons:
-Sandbox ocean needs more stuff in it (It's early access)
-Builder needs a symmetry mode (It's early access)
-Block placement is a little wonky (not bad persay, just persnickety sometimes), but dont you dare mess with the copy function (ie: where the new copy is placed)
-Please for the love of all that is good add airplane wheels! (It's early access)
-I feel there need to be some sort of block cleanup function, OUT of builder mode (It's early access)
-More blocks please, especially 1x_ corners for the 1x3/1x4 blocks (It's early access)
-This "Exploration Mode" I keep hearing about sounds cool, but they took it out. Don't worry, I doubt its going to stay out though, it makes sense to pull it out until the game balancing was done
-NETCODE: I'm just a layman but any multiplayer lobby I joined had bad return lag on any action more than just moving your vessel. I was still able to have battles, but not being able to see your shots until they hit kinda sucked. (It's early access)
TBH: The devs could just fix up those issues, polish it off a bit, sit back, and they'd have a decent game that'd get good playtime. With how active the devs seem to be with the community, I don't see it stopping there....
I'd give it a 7/10, being early access that actually pretty decent. In fact, there has only been one other early access game I had rated higher than a 5 personally, and that was Space Engineers....
And looky looky how many hours I have in THAT
(Edits are grammar/typo fixing)

If you were a Lego-Maniac as a kid, or still love to build stuff up just to tear it down and rebuild...then this is the sandbox for you:) Build a nice little car and rip around the map, oh...maybe a couple of wings on the sides! Now it just needs a few thrusters...and BOOM! My car is flying!
There's no limit to what you can build when your imagination is the Trailmaker:)

An Indie Gem on Steam.
Trailmakers is the game with the most satisfying and user-respecting LEGO-like editor I've ever seen.
You can quickly build all sorts of vehicles fast, being able to select multiple blocks or rectangle-selecting whole sections and copy-pasting them elsewhere. This, along with the beautiful graphics, extremely good sound design and very fun main campaign gameplay just makes it so much worth its price*. And if you are into co-op and multiplayer, the multiplayer Just Works with zero issues (in my experience), making the game a lot more fun.
The main campaign, or game mode, is comprised of a big map full of different areas (or 'biomes'), providing different challanges for you to tackle using a multitude of different blocks. These challenges are about recovering Salvage Parts and bringing them to Recovery Areas - you have to use vehicles to be able to reach and push/pull/grab Salvage back into a recovery spot.
Each Salvage either unlocks you a new part (ranging from basic Frame blocks up to Jet Engines, upgraded Car Engines or better wheels), or unlocks you a 'Power Core' - the more Power Cores you have salvaged, the more Engines (Jets, Hover, Car, Water, etc) you can add on a vehicle. This makes it so you are always building, upgrading or updating your creations in order to tackle new and different challenges, and opening a lot of room for experimentation or self-made challenges such as not cheesing out by using Gimbal Jets right when unlocking them.. :)
If you are into puzzles and building, the campaign is perfect. It also works perfectly well in co-op and multiplayer, and it's a lot more fun to play with others!
The game also has other maps and game modes available, that are about allowing players to test their creations on different situations, performing stunts, running races and time trials, performing treasure hunts, and overall just having some freeform fun. I'm way more about the main campaign puzzle-like gameplay so I can't comment much about these other maps and game modes, but I felt they were well done and with good attention to detail when trying them out.
Only truly negative thing I've found out about Trailmakers is that it ends. Other than that, it was a blast from start to finish. Kinda literally, as we (me and wife) may have exploded hundreds of times.
My only suggestion would be for the developers to further expand the Blueprint section of the editor, allowing players to categorize, name or label their creations in order to make it easier/faster to have multiple self-made vehicles saved along with all their multiple potential variants.
Adding a Symmetry mode or a Mirror button would be awesome, too!
In summary, it's very easy to notice that a lot of love, time, work and attention went into the creation of the game. In our first 5 minutes playing it, we instantly knew we were gonna love it.
For whatever reason, the feeling and experience is very close to that of Astroneer, except Trailmakers has no base building or resource gathering (and this is actually a plus, as it allows you to focus on exploration and tackling challenges - different games, different features).
*: Thanks to Humble Choice for adding this on their January 2020 game bundle - for some reason I had never seen this game before, even though I'm 100% in and around all sorts of building/LEGO games. This made the game price be super cheap compared to the huge amount of fun it provided to us!

After spending nearly 1000 hrs of my life into the game (and now that I'm typing it, it's kind of scary), I can firmly guarantee that I've never played a vehicles related game that has let me express my creativity this much.
What to expect:
The racing experience - Splitted between Rally Mode and the various races across Race Island, it allows you to get the necessary experience in terms of driving (but mostly in terms of building), in order to understand the way the aerodynamics and the physics works in the game, of course providing also a lot of fun and ingame currency to unlock more and more parts. You will race with any sort of things, including airplanes, hovercrafts, hydrofoils (wait hydrofoils? Yep), boats, submarines, not only cars.
The replica experience - After a while, you will see replicas of a large number of vehicles around the workshop, and you'll start craving to build one of them. Your favourite Jet? Your favourite tank? Your favourite car? Your own car?? Recreating them is a proper challenge in terms of realism, but the fun and the amount of satisfaction at the end of the process is guaranteed.
Multiplayer - You've got a bunch of mates that are trying to fine tuning their race cars to climb the leaderboards right? Create (host) a server, invite them, and instead of helping them, spawn your favourite tank and start shooting them!! Racecars always provides a nice challenge as targets. Don't you worry, they'll just have to press R to quickly respawn. Just hope they don't decide to spawn their favourite jet bomber instead :D
The Workshop - Trying others ideas kindly shared in the workshop it's always nice, isn't it? Just don't reupload stuff that does not belong to you, it's just a D move and you'll get reported. Just saying.
The Community - The devs runs a Community Discord, I can say it's a nice crowded place. There you'll find any sorts of stuff: blueprints, crazy gifs & screenshots, building tips and ideas, weekly challenges, and u'll get support from both players and devs. Just be polite.
I bougth the game for 15€, at the time the full price was 20€ and it was 25% off. Would I buy this game for the actual 25€ price? Indeed yes, I'd buy it for up to 30/35€ with no regrets.
Have fun! :D

Received this game purely by random. I've got tired of Lego about 20 years ago, see, and wasn't looking for any title about those or similar blocks. Turns out I was wrong and Trailmakers actually deserve both its price and some of the playtime of yours... provided you have an interest in the open-world games where you collect stuff to be able to collect even more stuff with the help of things that you've already gathered and attached to your machines. My kids have shown even greater interest in this game than I, and I am kinda glad about it because now I don't have to explain about the aerodynamics of those models they are building, thanks to the physical engine there in Trailmakers.
Let's just call this game a fair challenge. You don't get any foes in there (except multiplayer mode), there is no such thing as perma-death. You can die pretty often if you are careless and like to jump in the volcano every now and then - or you may not die at all, it's not as it was written on the stone anyway. What you are supposed to do - is to build some machinery from some standard blocks, and use it to get even more blocks, to be able to construct some advanced units. From the basic 4-wheel cart to jets, helicopters, submarines, hovercrafts, all-terrain vehicles... Or maybe you want to build a giant bipedal robot? Oh, yes, you can! All of those are wrapped into some complicated physical model, with a broad variety of terrain and environment. There are enough challenges, there are plenty of points to use your wits and construct just the tool you need in the very specific conditions.
So I do recommend a least to consider this game as something on your list. Look at the store page, check community and videos... If you have a thing for open worlds and sandboxes, if you like to build stuff, to create something that was not pre-made by some game designers - you have a good chance to get hooked there for some time.
My mark is 8/10. There is no story, but as a game to practice some creativity while building and driving various machines - it is really good. I can only wish for better controls in complicated vehicles such as hovercrafts or helicopters...

I went into Trailmakers without a lot of hope it would be my thing. I've dabbled in a little Mining and Crafting, sure, but I bounce hard off of the average blocky creative powered by your imagination type games. This is because I lack a sense of childlike wonder—kids are just better at this thing, the same way kids are better at Lego or building a pillow fort. I'm old and grouchy and my imagination has soured and these sorts of games just don't work for me at all.
But hot damn Trailmakers is an amazing game, even for a grump like me. This is entirely because of the Campaign mode, which is a work of genius.
If you're the only other person in existence who liked Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, thank you for sharing my cruel burden and your long vigil for the successor is over. It's extremely similar in premise to the ill-fated Banjo joint, but with far better building tools (the wonders of a mouse and keyboard!) and a much, much, much more compelling hook.
Instead of building cars or planes or whatever to do boring missions, the Trailmakers campaign throws you onto a teeny island on a sizeable planet with wheels, axles, a motor and a seat. From there you need to build something that'll find and retrieve yellow orbs, each one with a new part you can infinitely copy from your catalogue of bits. It's simple, but the progression is intoxicating. Clear out the landing zone and you'll have the gist of what you need for a terrible raft, which'll get you across the ocean to the bigger tires that'll get you up the hill to get the beefier engine which'll give you the hoist to get the stronger pontoons and so on and so on.
This makes every block a puzzle to safely bring it to a drop point, but also an exciting little treat when you finally do—getting all the bits for a helicopter was one of the most exciting things that's ever happened to me in a video game, at least until I realized how hard it is to fly a helicopter. And there's a similar feeling of the world opening up to you when you finally engineer a working submarine, or a wall-scaling tank, or just a dang zippy car that can hit allllll the jumps without blowing up. Impossible parts because achievable, and 9 times out of 10 if you have a crazy idea that just. might. work... well, you can wrangle it together somehow!
There are other modes, multiplayer, PVP, whatever but I didn't mess with those all that much. The rally mode seems neat, and the sandboxes look nice, sure. But I wouldn't need a single other mode because the campaign was so good and so compelling it was worth the price of admission alone.
There's nitpicks, like the disappointingly abrupt ending or the occasional physics hiccup. But it's very rare when a game gets me this excited to share with others—my poor girlfriend would come home every night to hear about my 50foot tall mobile oil derrick, or my skydiving bubble mailer, or some other latest disaster to recover an elusive bit. All this combines for an easy slam dunk recommendation. It's puzzles, it's exploring, it's the laws of aerodynamics, what else could you want?

This game is for anyone who used to play game like Lego or Meccano as a child. If you like mechanics and building or if you are technically minded this game should scratch that itch. Games that are similar would be Scrap mechanic, TerraTech, Logic bots, Main Assembly or Logic world. I've been playing this game since the open beta and the improvements in gameplay and performance has been great. I'm so happy to see this game release from early access and I can not recommend it enough.