Steam Community :: Charlza

1,190.7 hrs on record (1,028.7 hrs at review time)

This game was released back in 2018 with a fantastic concept. The idea of constructing complex vehicles with the potential for control systems based on an intuitive, visual and easy to learn / difficult to master logic system was and still has not been seen elsewhere. The missions were simple but enjoyable and the oceans and world were basic but well designed and showed how much potential there was.

Unfortunately, thanks to countless mistakes by the incompetent developers, this game will never reach its massive potential.

This may sound harsh but let me explain. The following components have bugs that range from frustrating to game breaking (and yes these have all been reported on the bugtracker, i'll get to that later):

- All Wedge pieces that are not 1x1
- All wing parts
- All control surfaces
- Pipes
- Pumps
- All outlets / inlets
- All regular engines
- Clutches
- Road wheels
- Aircraft wheels
- Train wheels
- Tank tracks
- Custom doors
- Non custom doors
- Winches
- Pivots

These represent a good number of the components you will regularly use in the game. Seems like a lot right? Bear in mind that do not include bugs in multiplayer, the building mode, missions, the mission editor, LUA, microcontrollers or the game world. From what I have seen from following the game over the years the primary cause of all of them is a refusal to accept that bugs and poor design choices exist in the game. Players may not have seen them all, they may not have experienced them yet, but the more they learn about how the game works and the more they try and do, the more problems they see.

When the game was first properly released (and in the demo before then too) the developers were receptive to feedback. Suggestions and bug reports were taken positively and introduced rapidly by the developers. Its hard to say when this attitude changed, but from my possibly wrong memory this changed once the advanced engines mode was introduced. That update arrived buggy and poorly thought out. Obviously people weren't happy. I will admit the most disastrous bug got fixed soon after (buoyancy calculations had broken completely, no one had thought to actually build something before pushing the update). All the rest stayed…

Around then the developers changed their bugtracker. Control over it was handed off to someone else and that person was forced to put in a lot of effort maintaining it and trying to prevent it from becoming saturated with duplicates and incomplete reports. The developers stopped reading the public bugtracker. Allegedly a second developer only bugtracker was then created with the intent of bugs being filtered from the public bugtracker into it if they are deemed to be valid.

It did not take long for the public bugtracker to fill up with hundreds of valid bug reports (along with admittedly a lot of poor submissions). Under the weight of all of them hundreds of bugs and very important suggestions were incorrectly closed and hence were not sent to the developers. Instead they were either marked as duplicates of unrelated bugs, marked as ‘not repeatable’ when they easily were or ‘insufficient information’ when they had more than enough detail to replicate them. This, in combination with a refusal to understand that it may be good game design to have things based on real stuff behave at least a little bit like real stuff and intentionally hiding information from players to cover up how unbalanced a lot of features are, has resulted in a ridiculous number of bug reports made by well meaning players trying to get things fixed.
The bugtracker has so many reports and suggestions that it is struggling to load and the development team have contracted someone to build a new one.

I put 1000 hours into this game. I posted bug reports (I posted 3 of the top 7 most upvoted bug reports on the bugtracker- one is fixed, one is not, one is marked as fixed when it is not...). I loved the concept and wanted it to succeed, but when so many of those 1000 hours were spent fighting bugs, when so many creations that I put time and effort into broke for no apparent reason, when I had to spend hours to figure out what was going on when components didn’t work in any sensible way, when I had to essentially break the game to even make components work sensibly it was just not worth wasting any more time on it (except this review, it’s satisfying writing it).

Unless you want to put in hours to make things at least barely work, unless you have hours to trawl through the steam workshop to find neat vehicles that haven’t been broken, unless you trust the developers to release a paid DLC that will inevitably be broken either on release or shortly after I would not recommend you spending money this game.

Maybe it will be fixed in the future, maybe the devs will change their attitude, until then I would suggest only getting it if you like constructing things as art pieces rather than using them, and even then waiting until it is on sale.

Oh wait...

P.S. The final thing that caused me to post this review after giving up on the game for a while was a comment made in a recent Q and A session hosted by a youtuber. The issues around bugs were raised to the lead developer, the main thing they said was along the lines of ‘report them to us, we can't fix bugs if we don't know what they are’.

The players have been reporting bugs and suggesting improvements for the past 3 years, you just refused to listen.

Posted 4 January, 2021. Last edited 2 July, 2021.

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