Developer: Volcanoid
Publisher: Volcanoid
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Volcanoids – Preview
What would you do when you’re on an island with an active volcano? What would you do, when that volcano is about to erupt? Duck for cover and hope for the best? Or possibly just enjoy the show before your grand exit? Well, in Volcanoids you find yourself in such a situation. You’ll need to repair the broken drill in time and take cover or perish in the lava.
You’re dropped on an island in Volcanoids, and you’ll have to fix up a broken drilling ship, as your captain wants to salvage everything possible. While the volcano will erupt between certain time intervals, you will have enough time to do the first tutorial (depending on your difficulty). Here you will be taught how to mine ores, create resources, keep yourself sustained and create upgrades for the ship. Early on you will venture to the broken down driller, kill all the robots that occupy the location, fix it up and hide under the ground as the volcano erupts. Then you can do quests but these are mostly to collect resources and craft upgrades.
The game looks great at first but will fall flat really soon. Sceneries are colorful and will change after an eruption to an ashy field for a while, which has a certain charm. Sadly, when taking a closer look, there isn’t much detail to the game, animations are super simple, taking you back around fifteen years. This is clearly seen while interacting with tools, they simply swing around or reloading your weapons is done by a simple swing, nothing much details seen in the interactions. The sounds also don’t really add to the joy as nothing is voiced, and you’ll have to make do with basic steampunk sounds and fairly forgettable music.
While exploring the island you will notice that there are a lot of robots that roam the lands. At first, this is fun, shooting some tin cans and looting their remains. Sadly, after a while, this turns more into a job when you have your own driller. As it seems that the robots don’t take kindly to foreigners on their island and will constantly attack your base. You can place some turrets to defend it, yet it seems that they are very slow and will allow the bots to shoot a few times before returning fire. This means that going out and explore the island will be pretty difficult, as the attacks are every few seconds. During our first experience with the game, it was literally, you kill the attackers, fix the drill, kill the attackers, rinse and repeat. You cannot just park it underground, but you can relocate closer to objectives and maybe this is the way it is meant to be played.
In your ship, you have some options to craft stuff, as you will have to craft components to build consumables or upgrades. Most of the time you will be doing some boring tasks as the quests are mostly grabbing X, craft Y. Sometimes you will attack robots their strongholds, but this takes a lot of time and resources; all this while maintaining your ship so it doesn’t run out of coal and keeping track of the volcano’s eruptions.
You can play the game either solo or in co-op. Currently, co-op seems preferable as your friend can defend the base while you go out to grab supplies. The game does control quite well, as gunfights are very simple, as hitting robots in the heads is a piece of cake. Repairing and crafting are quick, simple and works well.
Conclusion
Volcanoids is a cool concept, where you have to mine for resources, kill robots and dodge eruptions. While initially, it looks really fun having to survive on a nice island, playing this game alone can become a large chore. Having to defend your base constantly from endless waves of robots, while your turrets don’t do their jobs right ends up becoming quite tedious. If you have a friend that can defend the place while you grab the resources, then it might be a fun game, yet at the moment there aren’t too many great points for getting this game in its current state.
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