Take a game with a good concept and throw in every con known to mankind, and you have RoboCraft, the game you want to love but want to strangle to death at any given time. Robocraft wants to be a good game that can allow players from around the world make their own tanks/planes/mechs/flying pinwheels and pit them against everyone else's, except that it fails on every part on what a good multiplayer experience should have and soon becomes boring, repetitive, and rage inducing.
In Robocraft, you can make just about anything you want to a degree (but more on that later). You have many options of movement from wheels that let you tread around the terrain to hoverblades that let you cushion some air between you and the hard ground. Advanced players can arm themselves with wings and take to the skies or mix everything together into some monstrosity that were not meant for the eyes of mere mortals. From the start, you get 3 robots to work with and 3 garages for each one. Each also demonstrates the unique weapons of the game: the sub machine gun, the plasma cannon, and the railgun.
Let's talk about the weapons: the sub machine gun is you standard 'SMG'; high fire rate, decent accuracy, and good effective range. They are the only weapon (at this time) to have two varieties: front mounted and top mounted, with front mounted being able to lay on the face of a cube and top mounted being best for being on top of a cube. The plasma cannon is an arcing explosion-on-hit weapon that requires some skill to use, but once mastered, it can easily be one of the better weapons in the game. It is only trumped by the railgun, which might as well be the 'point and kill' weapon. The SMG and plasma gun do not have block penetrating damage (though the plasma has splash damage), whereas the railgun does. While it's balancing factor is that it takes 20 seconds to reload, this creates a problem because of how the game determines 'death.'
In your design of a mech (robot, mech, at this point, the game doesn't really seem to define what on earth you are building), you have a pilot seat, which is where your pilot sits. For a game called 'Robocraft', this seems out of place, and in gameplay, it is. It is a 'block' that consists of 2 blocks outwards and 3 blocks in height. It must rest on two blocks underneath and those two blocks are your only lifeline. Let me repeat: TWO BLOCKS DEFINE IF YOU ARE ALIVE OR DEAD. Remember the railgun's penetration ability? It didn't get the nickname 'point and kill' sitting around drinking on a summer beach (the plasma cannon is no better). Your dream robot better have a huge underbelly because that is your only way to survive, but even then that only gives you a slightly better chance at not dying.
So let's talk about gameplay. At the moment, there is only one game mode: Capture the point. A team wins by sitting on their enemy's base until the timer gods are satisfied with your demonstration of doing nothing or you can kill the enemy team in your quest for showing off your mad Plasma cannon skills. This is all assuming you survive the first 5 seconds of the match. The game's physics engine is your first real enemy: assuming there is at least one impatient person on your team (pro tip: there always will be one), you may run into the situation that just a gentle bump will send your Robotic death machine into a flying whirl that can only be achieved in a cartoon. If you land right side up, proceed to call that teammate a ♥♥♥♥♥ and move on. If you don't, congratulations: you are now target practice for the enemy railgunners and plasma cannon users until either they kill you (and your two blocks too), or the match ends. You can quit the game at this point with the penalty of taking 25% damage (more on that later).
Assuming you survive the onslaught called 'Lack of Teamwork', the network engine will come out to play. 'Warping', or when an entity moves from place to place due to network latency, is common and the same happens with their bullets. This can make SMGs get magical penetrating powers and make enemies appear to attempt a re-run at flipping you over like the impatient teammate whose mech looked like a fried egg. This doesn't have a lot but when it does happen, you can join the therapy party for everyone else who died from the same reason, and that party is at least a third of the player base.
So about damage in the game. The game's definition of 'damage' is the total health of your mech, which is mostly attributed by what blocks you used, since each one's armor value is different depending on which ones you do use. If a set of blocks becomes disconnected, that is considered to be doing a massive amount of damage and your health will plummet like most of your hopes and dreams of what could be achieved in the game. Any damage you receive at the end of a match (including if one of the two blocks providing your pilot leg room gets destroyed) must be repaired at the cost of either the in-game currency or actual money. Remember that 25% that you lose if you quit the game early? That also falls under your bill and if you get flipped over after taking damage, the 25% is only tacked on to what you have. This makes any earnings you received from the game get minimized even further. The game has a 'bonus engine', but the rules for that are to laugh at any player trying to actually achieve it: you must not die and your team must win. This means if your team wins but you were sacrificed to ensure victory, congratulations: you haven't appeased the Robocraftian gods enough for a pay raise. Will that be cash or cash?
Surely there has to be a way to keep the game balanced, and the game's attempt at it is laughable at best. There are 10 tiers, with each tier under the assumption that the weapons and armor of that tier is better. Unfortunately, this isn't the real world situation. You can be shoved into a higher tier due to using more blocks for your beach ball of doom or because of the weapon's lethality. On top of that, assuming you have evenly matched lethality and good looks, the matchmaking will often pit you against tiers 1 to 2 above your own. Suddenly those pair of sunglasses you added aren't looking so hot and floorless pilot is you with the enemy team's highest tier mech mowing your fellow team's tier mechs for target practice.
The icing on the cake is the map selection, and unlike the flavor selection at your Dairy Queen, you have only 4 to choose from, two being ice and the other being on Mars. If you have the misfortune to be rocking out with tires on the ice area, have fun on the ice river that each ice map offers, as it has a physical property where you will glide forever in one direction despite how much you try to turn and reverse the other way. You will grow thankful for how other games interprets ice physics after experiencing Robocraft's interpretation. Mars doesn't really have much going for it and the blandness will make you wish for another map, all of which are chosen randomly while matchmaking, which is the only option you have (no picking a match, no choosing an enemy platoon to face).
In closing, Robocraft is the game that wants to be unique and enjoyable, but falls flat on its face on its own ice physics only shortly after tripping over its own flaws. I haven't even covered its 'premium membership' and other obvious ploys to earn money quickly and with as little effort as possible, but those would only add insult to injury. Give Robocraft a try for an hour, but turn away and don't come back afterwards. At least until they get their act together and actually try listening to what little of a community they have.
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