About Build A Hideout And Sword Fight:
A great physics-based sandbox vehicle building game with lots of potential, let down by poor execution. I’m giving it a thumbs up because I had fun with it, but it’s really barely a pass. Building vehicles feels great. The editor is powerful and intuitive, probably the best I’ve seen in any vehicle building game (though that’s a short list). But there’s really nothing to do with all of your creations. The missions are very lackluster, and there’s not much of a progression system. I had the most fun just cruising around with friends in multiplayer, showing off our creations and doing races. But that gets old. There’s lots of little bugs / physics jank / quality of life annoyances that start to take their toll after a while. For example, the sound of wind is always the same, really loud, and plays purely based on your altitude. There is changing weather in the game (you can even use wind speed sensors), but the wind sound always plays from about 80 meters up, regardless of the weather or if you’re inside a vehicle or not. On long flights this gets really annoying. Also, while buoyancy is really well done and it’s lots of fun to battle the waves, make a submarine or try hydroplaning, the aerodynamics simulation is really lacking. The air feels like soup and you’ll plummet out of the sky as soon as you turn off your engines. Building gliders is impossible. There’s also no point in trying to reduce drag: shape of your vehicle has almost no effect on its top speed. The key to speed is simply stacking more engines. Sound design is underwhelming. Having a big ship with massive engines actually sound like it would make it so much more enjoyable. Instead, you may as well turn off the sound completely. Considering the game’s focus on storms, it’s weird that their sound is so basic. If it’s raining and you go into a fixed building, instead of the rain sounding muffled, they’ve simply turned down the volume. It sounds really strange. More importantly, this only happens when you enter fixed buildings. When you’re in a vehicle, water-tight or not, it always sounds like you’re outside. Visual effects could be much improved as well. Fire and exhaust is just basic particle effects, and you can count the particles. No volumetrics (clouds are just polygons you fly straight through). There’s not even a screen effect when your character gets too cold and you start taking damage. Even a very basic effect like the edges of the screen starting to turn white, or the sound of a shivering voice, would add so much to the experience. The worst thing is that the devs seem very disinterested. Community outreach is almost nil, consisting of a few Q&A sessions with one specific Youtuber. They implement features nobody asked for (like local weather instead of weather that’s the same for the entire map), while ignoring seemingly simple issues people have been asking about for years (like the buoyancy of two nearly identical parts being wildly different – all it took to fix it was changing a number in an XML file). There are no plans to improve career mode and development seems to happen at a snail’s pace. Some new parts (mostly ones that nobody asked for) are introduced every few months, but that’s about it. TL;DR: Enjoy exploring the intricate mechanics of all the parts, but don’t expect anything close to a polished game.
