Did you ever play with those plastic toy blocks that snap together? The ones whose brand name rhymes with MEGO? You know the ones. Well, it's like that, you're building wacky vehicles to do some different jobs. The game describes itself as "moving... awkwardly shaped cargo from place to place." This is completely true, but such a profound understatement like "lava is a bit toasty". Yes, you move things with your MEGO weirdo-haulers, but that's like maybe a third of the game.

Making it so you can even get there is the other two thirds.

This starts off with radio towers; your vehicle's remote-controlled, so you need to send it signals. Each tower you put down has a limited radius, and needs line-of-sight to another tower, so... I spend probably way too long optimizing where to put the things. They're cheap, you don't need to do what I do. But maybe you want to go put a tower on the top of a jagged peak, and it's a tradeoff between that and how much cussin' you want to do trying to get a buggy up the side of a sheer cliff.

Later, there's monorail lines and maybe even elevated highways, and it means to can start bypassing some of the worst terrain. But until you get there, you should get used to reading a topographical map and practice your best cusses. You're goin' offroadin'.

What you need to know is the vehicles can be dynamically rebuilt, if you've unlocked the parts. If things like approach or breakover angles doesn't mean a lot to you, you're going to learn! More importantly, "center of mass". The game goes a little easy on you, I think the offroad tires have some kind of van der waal's grip dealie on them, but the effect is small. Get something topheavy and ungainly, and you're not going to have a good time. Some of the terrain can be really rough and require a relatively small vehicle.

Note that I didn't mention departure angle up there. Some of the cargo can be fragile, but your vehicle is indestructible. I've sent whatever I've been using off cliffs without a care in the world. Now, the problem with that is if you're carrying cargo and it pops loose.

And that's the real meat of the game: You've got to lug some weird items around the map. I have carried bendy pipes, a floppy air duct, an umbrella, a bundle of balloons, step ladders, a toaster with toast, and so many more. You'll need a vehicle that can pick up the item, and if that item has its own items, you either need to avoid tipping, or being able to manipulate small items. And then carry those item(s) over potentially rough terrain to their destination.

If you drop it, you need to pick it up again. If it had parts, all of them need to make it to the destination, though there's no reason you can't do it in multiple trips. That said, I wind up playing it in small doses sometimes. My wife's heard enough cussin'. But it also does a few things for you: the tires seem unnaturally grippy, and the game does throttle control on your behalf so you've got maximum grip while climbing.

So, yeah, I didn't even get to the graphics 'til down here. They're kind of basic, some low-palette cel-shaded affair. Edges are highlighted so if you're driving along and there's a visible edge, you probably want to slow down before you get there or you're going sailing and, if you're unlucky, not landing squarely and going for a tumble. It's a visual style that takes a bit of getting used to.

Hauling ass throws up big clouds of dust. Despite the cel-shading, it does a really good dust simulation. Since it's Mars, I do expect dust, after all. I think I only brought this up because I remember somebody ranting about this in the forum.

Anyway, I know I've been rambling and I think I lost the thread of what I was meaning to write here anyway. It's got a coop implementation, I've yet to try it. I've had a fine time at this, I'll be chipping away at it some more over time. It's all entertainingly low key, requiring more patience than, sometimes, I'm willing ot provide. But that's a me issue.

So if you kind of liked building up custom, weird vehicles in Space Engineers to solve problems, this is much the same, except waaaaaay less janky. And therefore you should get in on it.

If you made it down here, not put off by my rambling, I'd like to invite you to pop by and chat me up a bit during my streams. Honestly, I do it more to meet people than anything else. http://www.twitch.tv/fdejeuner. Schedule's up in my profile.

The concept is great and it's initially quite fun, but there are a ton of little issues that, while easy to overlook initially, eventually become too great to ignore and ruin an otherwise good experience.
- Copying and pasting parts needs to be faster. Give us multiple copy buffers.
- Let us create part prefabs (like claws or lifters) so I don't have to build the same claw 20 times.
- Let me mirror along an axis.
- Let me autobuy missing parts while I'm building.
- Allow me to change vehicle inputs without completely resetting the vehicle (this is just silly)
- The shader and tesselation distance of the floor makes spotting divots and bumps more difficult than it needs to be.

The core loop is pretty good. Build a bot, deliver goods, unlock more parts. A huge part of this game is experimenting with different builds to tackle the challenges of terrain and objects. But the building process is so damn clunky. It needs to be streamlined. I dread going into the build mode because it takes so many clicks to make a simple change to a vehicle to experiment. This interface needs a ton of love and should be priority #1 for your UX designer.

If you're stupid like me and worried that you might not be creative or patient enough to play this game, I recommend giving it a go. It's really fun to just try stupid ideas together and the game strikes a perfect balance between puzzle difficulty and forgiving requirements for success. Also the game is very pretty and runs like butter. Amazing that it's only 400MB