Please give a warm welcome to Rob Zacny, the new writer of Premature Evaluation. Each Monday he’ll be picking through the detritus of early access to separate the games might one day be assembled into something worthwhile from those which should remain on the scrapheap.>

A confession: I think sandbox games are boring.

Which makes their popularity kind of ironic, considering that Jim Rossignol once wondered whether games might one day “banish the curse of boredom from our lives.” If you look at the great majority of popular Early Access games on Steam, you’ll find they are either about sandbox construction and crafting, or about survival, or both.

Entire worlds at our fingertips, all manner of heroes, explorers, and villains to choose from, and yet the surest way to players on Early Access is to leave them with a few building blocks, a lot of room to use them, and nothing else to do. So it is in Scrap Mechanic.

… [visit site to read more]

Crafting games are as common as scrap, but I like the look of Scrap Mechanic [official site] more than most because it has tools to animate the contraptions you make in it with hinges, pumps and wheels. The latest trailer for the game’s creative mode shows this off with buggies which unfold to release drones, AT-ATs that actually stomp and trucks that can be driven into the back compartments of other larger trucks. The trailer marks the game’s arrival in Steam Early Access today.

… [visit site to read more]