Trailmakers

WOW. I'll start by saying I got this wayyyyy back after 1.0 on Gamepass (ignore my playtime, I only recently bought it for PC), and back then, it was a hard sell. Sure, for maker-types, it was everything you could ask for- brick by brick building, challenges that matched cleanly and cleverly with the progression. but it had a largely sandbox feel to it, which made it difficult to stay motivated and unlock everything

In the 2.0 campaign however, I am blown away with what is essentially an entirely different game mode. This campaign is truly a campaign; theres a story, xp based unlocks, resource collection and crafting, and it showcases the combat aspects of the game that were largely unused in 1.0 outside of multiplayer. This makes 1.0 feel like a demo, a proof of concept, and while I still enjoy going back to it, it's safe to say I'll be spending a lot of time in the new campaign first!

This latest update seriously could be a paid DLC, it is *that* good, but the devs gave it to us for free!!

Would definitely recommend to anyone who enjoys maker type games, as the only limits in this game are your imagination and physics! This 2.0 update feels like a completely different game in the best way possible! It had character before, but now? It has charm as well, and I can't recommend it enough!

-load uo game
-be stupid and know jack "shirt"
-"what? Huh? Oh"
-search up how to get good
-give up
-"ill play this again tomorrow"
-only understand weight distribution because of online
10/10 would dedicate more fo my time

First Impression:
After around 27 minutes of playing the game, I find the game pretty interesting and will probably play more of it. This game is basically a sandbox game with LEGO shaped blocks of some sort.

To begin with, I would like to state that this is only a first impression and any opinion here is a subject to change. The game itself is optimized well as my 7 years old 750 Ti is able to run it well.

The game offers interesting features where you can just dump your creativity and create something (basically a good game to invent stuff I guess).

Overall the game gave a really good impression on what we can do and I would highly recommend getting this game if you're into making stuff especially vehicles.

Genuinely one of my favorite games ever. its challenging enough to be difficult, but also easy enough to be fun. Highly recommend to anybody who likes Lego type things.

The first thing I tried was to have 2 engines but they both work backwards to one another. And lo and behold the car didn't move. What is this, goty or what

This game is a cool idea with excellent polish. The physics....sometimes screws up.
The DLC and business model is fairly exploitative. Cash shop. Ew. Rude.
The flow of the game also suffers from kiddie-ification it does not trust you with a main menu on first boot and throws you straight into their half baked story.
Like... geez shut it. I just wanna get in and build something with my wife.
The moment they enshitify further, I'm not touching it. Even a little bit of free DLC would be nice.
6/10....for now. Just because... the Devs are scumbags who love taking candy from literal babies....That does not bode well for the future of this game.

Game is great,
Accidentally got addicted though.

got reccomended by a friend for this game, and i've averaged over 1hr per day. it good

honestly very good game but after some time (100 hour+) there is pretty much nothing to do. I mean great game and worth the money but still after 100 hours there are pretty much nothing to do.(unless you buy the dlcs

It's not bad. I preferred the way it used to be. A little adventure just driving about collecting upgrades and trying to build the right vehicle for the job. Now it just feels like a rip off of TerraTech... ugh WHY!

mailtrakers by flashbang is an amazing game if you like building vehicles

Best Vehicle Building Game!

Good game easy to build stuff and to have fun with friends i have played this game for more then 3 years now in PC and PlayStation

I think the games is really fun but one of the cons is it relies on DLC a little too much now

it was so fun when i beat the game after my hard work of colleting all of the scraps

The recent update has a lot of bugs.
Bots that just enter safe zones and even attack you if you fly into one.
Passengers spawning in places you cant reach with your vehicle
and it sometimes adds or removes crafted blocks.

I really love the new campaign, but in it's current state it kinda sucks a bit

Trailmakers was an absolute blast... before the Pioneers update. The vehicle-building system is honestly great, and I love the physics. But the Pioneers update changed the pace completely. The new grindy resource system slows everything down, making early-game progress frustrating instead of exciting or fun. Spending an hour gathering materials, just to unlock a single part kills a lot of the spontaneity and fun. It still shines once you get going, but getting there now takes more patience than it should. Devs, please give us a toggle for the old system - we miss being able to just craft our silly little cars and planes and boats!

Graphics
☐ Cinematic
☐ Beautiful
☒ Pretty
☐ Good
☐ Pixel art

Gameplay
☐ Clunky
☐ Repetitive
☒ Smooth
☐ Satisfying
☐ Addictive

Story
☐ Emotional
☐ Confusing
☐ Generic
☒ Nonexistent
☐ Mind-blowing

Audio
☐ Forgettable
☐ Immersive
☐ Banger soundtrack
☐ Voice acting needs work
☒ Chill vibes

Bugs
☐ Unplayable
☒ A fair few
☐ Barely any
☐ Perfectly polished

Multiplayer
☒ More fun with friends
☐ PvP is cracked
☐ Solo recommended
☐ Needs work

Pioneers Update
☐ Great addition
☐ Balanced
☒ Way too grindy
☐ Didn’t notice it
☐ Makes it better

Recommend?
☒ Yes
☐ No
☐ Only on sale
☐ With mods

fantastic game
no cloud saves is a bummer but you can always syncthing it

fun game to test your creativity skills combat skills against Pirates and other players from small builds to massive battleships and bombers

I would recommend this game to others

Im going to say yes, this is a good game, BUT, the community kinda sucks. Half of them are 12 and the other half are so far up their own a$$

Its a great game alowing for endless creativity and still having the things you make work well.
it has several campaings and a few sandbox maps. Overall a great game to play on steam 9/10
my only quirie is how much you have to pay to get all the additoinal contenet

Yes, the game is fun. But the new update in my opinion ruined the whole game for me. It does not feel like the same game. That is not a good thing.

I enjoyed my time with Trailmakers, it was even better than I expected as a customizable vehicular exploration game. I played through Stranded first, and the simple loop of constantly iterating and experimenting with your vehicles to solve new problems as they presented themselves in order to get new blocks to play with was solid and continuously engaging. Finally figuring out how to get certain designs off the ground was a joy. The vehicle creator/sandbox itself is also really solid. You can get creative and make pretty much anything you can imagine, and make it look good too.

I played the new campaign Pioneers soon after, and it was more of a mixed bag. Having to level up to get new blocks and power cores, and having to gather resources to make blocks, really slowed down the process and stymied both experimentation and aesthetics. I did like the setting of Gregory and the Froggits, but overall Pioneers was less engaging and flexible for me, and more about grinding. But while I finished on more of a sour note, I do think the game's great overall and definitely something worth picking up and messing around with.

The game itself was already a masterpiece and with the new update it definitely makes the game better...





Especially because they fix the suspensions 🫨

Is the game fun? Yes. Do I want more people to play it? Yes.

Do I think it deserves a positive review? meh, not really?

Sure the game is fun and enjoyable, and there's no singular thing wrong with it to ruin the experience, but there are *a lot* of small and/or minor things which all add up into a lack of polish.

Most of these things aren't gameplay blockers or major annoyances, so I still can recommend it, but there are just *so many* small things adding up that I never had a chance to forget about the problems, such as:

- Unexplained deaths and/or vehicle damage: for the most part the game is quite forgiving and you don't often take 'accidental' damage, but when you do it is always severe and unintuitive or unexplained
- Unreliable part controls: putting multiple parts working together or using them in a way the game didn't expect can often lead to controls simply not working, or very weird behavior that doesn't make sense. I found myself having to *delete and re-build* and re-configure the part controls to fix it in some cases.
- Obviously wrong physics behaviors: in multiple occasions I have had situations where the physics simply break down, such as the main chassis of a solid vehicle splitting in half and rotating *instead of* the turret on the aiming servo, which somehow remains still???
- Missing keybindings and controls options: in a game all about configuring your own vehicle and the way it works, and in every other game I've seen of the genre, I expect to have simple things like being able to bind extra mouse buttons (4/5, forward and back, etc) or reconfigure all of the game's own controls.

Luckily, none of these issues were major enough to stop me from enjoying the game, so I can still click 'Yes' for Steam, but I really hope that the devs will spend some time cleaning up the edge cases and making the foundation of the game rock-solid before moving on to adding fanciful new campaigns or content.

I tried really hard to like the new 2.0, but it's just really unfun. It makes me so sad I feel I have to write such a negative review. It's like they took the original game, and thought "Wouldn't it be fun if we took this non-linear game with an original gameloop, and turned it into the most generic RPG possible, with incredibly boring fights and hardly four enemy types, and the requirement to grind for XP and materials?"

I was excited when I realised that they gave you just enough parts in the _linear level up system_ to create a flighing machine at an early level, but then realised that every location that you can get to with the flighing machine is just full of NPCs without any dialogue -- because the game doesn't expect you to be there in it's linear "story".

The boat gameplay is extremely unfun to me, but lets assume this is a skill issue and there's someway to build an amazing boat (probably involving buying another DLC which is needed to unlock the decent boat part). What isn't excused is that the same enemies you fight everywhere else now duck underwater and are immune to damage for waaaay to long, causing it to be a game of mostly waiting for enemies to resurface.

The last straw for me was the 2nd boss, which (other than making me ask "Why does Trailmakers have _boss fights_?) made me realise they had such little faith in their own game balance, because the bosses HP doesn't reset between deaths. This, I can only assume, is because a player who farms all the materials and XP and quests and bought the DLC will have a huge oil tanker full of 10 auto-aiming weapons, but a player going through at a normal pace will have a tiny dingy. Instead of trying to balance this, they just make you either grind or through your tiny dingy at it 100 times slowly trying to defeat the waves.

The original Trailmakers was so good, but they clearly got so much backlash from people complaining that their later instalments where just sandboxes, that they over compensated and created the most generic and unfun product that feels like it was designed by someone asking ChatGPT "How do I add gameplay to my sandbox game"

Trailmakers good game, there is a lot of worlds and that is good and there is a lot to do in it.
the end

So I really want to recommend this game but can't at the moment. Its a fun game that has a robust building system and is being actively developed so it should be a no brainer. Unfortunately, there is a good chance your game could just break and never load again. This is a known issue from my understanding, going back all the way to the beginning of the game. Basically, if you have a hard crash and your PC turns off while playing, then whatever mode of the game you were playing at the time could be forever stuck in loading afterwards. Happened to me with Pioneers and after over a week of trying literally everything suggested, (even deleting all my save data and starting with a fresh install) it still gets stuck on loading. Devs have been silent and the only response I received from Flashbulb was an automated 'thanks for emailing' message.
If you have a UPS and are super diligent about backing up your games all the time, then sure get this game. I did really enjoy it for the time it worked for me. And if they ever fix this issue Ill change my review but for now, I can't recommend.

"IF" you like to spend countless hours perfecting and tuning a beloved build, only to have the developers completely break that build and make it worthless every 6 months to a year, through constant changes to the physics engine or attributes and dynamic aspects to parts, components, or logic... then by all means, get this worthless dogsh** of a game.

Honestly, over the years, more and more friends that came together to enjoy this game as a group found themselves giving up on the game because of the reason stated in the above paragraph... Not only do these devs seem like they haven't a clue as to how to optimize a game by removing critical operating code that holds literal builds together, but they also can't seem to make up their mind one what this game is when it comes to physics. They nerf and nerf and nerf until you are left with only building simplistically rather than advanced and complex logic staging that can go deep into a builds core mechanics.

-Too many block nerfs
-Too many constant changes to the physic engine
-Older builds with complex logic no longer work
-The constant dumbing down of the game catering to an ever growing dumber and younger player-base.

It feels like the brains that was behind all the critical features and mechanics of this game left the company and was replaced by people who bother don't know what their doing nor play the game themselves.

I can no longer support or defend this game anymore to those who have left it behind for reasons stated above.

If I'd have known they'd be gating off content with $88+(Not counting the OST) in DLC, I probably would not have purchased it in the begining.
That said, Its a good game I'm just not interested in paying a hundred dollars to play it the way it should be... It's not THAT good.

It's a hard-mode vehicle physics sandbox.

Don't go into this expecting to have fun building effecting creations in single player campaign. It pretty much expects you to already be a master at building vehicles. There really isn't any step-by-step effort in building up your skills. Sure, it gives you a basic of basics template, but it's a piece of junk that will not get you far, and you will need to spend hours upon hours trying to figure out how to make it better. Especially since there is no creation mode for the campaign, so blocks are locked behind levels and bosses.

Boat and air combat are absolutely horrible (unless you're already a master at building and controlling the vehicles). For boat combat, the enemies stay below the surface, then pop out to attack before diving again. It's very difficult to take them on if you are new to the game.

For air combat, well....good luck. Any aircraft you design in not going to have any sort of stability, making combat almost impossible (again...unless you are already a master at building these things).

Aside from gameplay, the build mode is frustrating. If you are just using mouse & kb, you'll be fine, but if you like to switch to a gamepad for playing, then you have to edit your settings every time you want to go into build mode, and disable controller support. Make your changes to your build, exit build mode, then edit settings again and re-enable controller support. Very annoying and something that should have been fixed in development.

I tried really hard to like this. I keep going back to it after watching more videos of other players' creations, thinking that maybe...just maybe THIS time I can get a decent stable creation that is fun to play, but nope! Every single time, it is just more disappointment.

Honestly, I'd suggest not wasting your time at all, but if you must, definitely don't pay full price. Pick it up when it's on sale.

game-play is good, every update is them adding a new dlc instead of adding more content for free, if you're going to do that atleast make the game free

I absolutely love Trailmakers! The building system is super easy and nice, letting me design anything from simple cars to insane flying creations. The physics feel realistic, making every creation a fun challenge especially planes. Exploring the world is a blast, whether I'm playing Campaign Mode or just messing around in Sandbox Mode. Multiplayer adds even more chaos and creativity. I’ve had so much fun racing, building and blowing up my friends.

Vehicle building game where you use your building skills and available vehicle parts solve logistics puzzles and engage in combat. The games open world means you approach logistics puzzles/combat from whatever angle you want. Flying boat? Tank? Bulldozer? F1 racecar? submarine? Or just any combination of parts. Your imagination is the limit. The enemy is robots, so combat is family-friendly and fun for all ages, and can be difficult at times. The devs are also dedicated to a great vision, and just released an update that greatly expands on the games premise, with many updates to come! Dont Sleep on this gem of a game!

Dissapointing
Lackluster
DLC's should be base game content (not pay gating base game content like it is)
Story mode was ... interesting
The amount of content you actually get, is far less than what you'd expect.
Around 6 years of development and you honestly don't get much for a payout in return. Single / Duo indie devs honestly can get a lot more done in a shorter time span than this.

Hoping it improved, but don't expect much.

I think there is a lot of cool stuff in this game... BUT:
-Building is not great there should at least be a translate option considering how little the game care about placing things where you want.
-few parts (most components have 1-3 variant unless you get dlcs which are gonna be in your build menu to sell/annoy ig)
-parts are not versatile: You can't make a wing with frame blocks it just add weigth no lift, can't move paddle to move water you need the water propeller, can't make a submarine till you unlock the sub cockpit else no matter how many layers of frame you put around it you get ejected because "underwater seat" etc.
-Physics defying stuff like even if you go 100 km/h on a motorcycle you will fall to the side unless you have a gyro (ofc they give you seats and wheel early but they don't do anything till much later when you get the gyro... why is it not included in the motorcycle seat to make it legit ?) I think my character use dark magic or something to control some of the vehicules i made...
-Quite buggy often had to restart because floating blocks appear and chill near me, or sometimes stuff just break randomly and you have to rebuild or respawn.
-Saving is weird you just can't do it manually, does not save on quit, sometimes save after a quest... I just had to redo my last quest: i did it came back to village talked to the guy then quit, i come back and i still have to do it and im missing a lot of ressources.
-Can't change most controls: some parts control you can change but f is the key to press to exit vehicule (instant death in combat) also you need to hold f for 2 sec then while holding f press 1-2-3-4 to choose vehicule (like switching from the travel/mining you are on to combat vehicule when you get shot) That's just great nothing wrong at all here. (im kidding you can't even control wasd when you try to change vehicule and ofc sometime a super small misclick can oneshot you and it's such an easy fix like wtf)

Anyways it's a building game so it can be fun and the campaigns are well made even though there is a bit more grinding then i would like (mostly how long it takes to get started and have more than just frames wheels and one bad weapon)
So if you are not running yet maybe get it on sale.
GLHF

they ruined the ui and everything is laggy in the new update, the game is so bloated now

Game is good for new players, devs are okay and sometimes listen to their community/players.

I would recommend it but i also recommend thinking about if its really worth it. So before someone gets disappointed later like us older/OG trailmakers players, future updates WILL break your vehicles and can be a pain to deal with, im a (hopefully) temporarily retired trailmaker, i stopped playing because of the new UI changes and the decision to not add a setting to get back the old UI, especially on controller is where the new UI is the most painful to build with.

The game will change and sometimes those changes are unwanted, unneeded and just extremely dumb from the developers.

Great game, great content.
2.0 is great.
Runs great on Linux, except you can't host a server with a password.

The bad:
The physics simulation screws up occasionally, but hardly noticeable unless you're really trying to break the game.

There are some basic tips for how to build certain types of vehicles, but unless you're a mechanical engineer you're basically stuck googling or watching youtube videos to figure out why your helicopter's nose keeps wobbling left to right, or why your car spins out after going >200mph. This can be a pro or con depending on your personality, but I feel like the game could do better job educating.

The combat isn't challenging at all, repair mechanics trivialize a lot of things unless you self-discipline (If I wanted to do that I wouldn't be playing video games haha). The boss mechanics are basically identical but with a different arena.

In the new update, they tried to slow power core progression by locking it behind a reputation system for different towns. In theory, I like this because more gameplay. In practice, they make you repeat the same boring pickup quest multiple times, and you remember repeatable quests weren't even a good thing in MMOs. While much of the bliss of the original game remains, you trade a lot of the "build to solve this problem" challenges for "build a general vehicle that kills stuff and hotkey to another that gathers stuff". I think I made like 2 cars and 1 boat for most of the game. It would have been way better even if all they did was double the number of passengers required every time you did the repeatable quest.

Resource farming: I suppose the design principle here is if you gate progression behind gathering, some people won't do it and it will limit their builds, inducing creativity. (Any artist will tell you constraints make it easier to be creative). In practice, if I need more engine seeds to build my car, I'm just going to get the engine seeds, no matter how many times I have to circle this stupid desert and beach. And somehow we've turned a physics puzzle solving game into a grindy gather and repeat quests game???

There are enemies that go underwater and they are annoying because most? weapons dont shoot underwater and diving is locked behind campaign completion.

All the game modes are too short.

Well that's a lot of cons, why do I recommend the game?
Even with all the drawbacks of the 2.0 campaign, it was still a blast to play because lego vehicle building simulator is a great game premise.

The builder is really intuitive, you can copy paste, there are blueprints,

The original campaign is still my favorite. Solve building challenges to unlock new stuff to do harder challenges. Love it.

If you just want to freely create cool vehicles there is a mode for that too.

When you finally make a giant airplane capable of carrying 10 passengers and it still flies straight you feel like a fucking god.

The physics simulation is usually really good. You will notice when you add a bunch of weight to one part of your vehicle.

Multiplayer works and doesn't suck.

It is fun to get better at driving/flying the vehicles you create. I have a whole new level of respect for bomber airplane pilots or whoever is calculating how and when to drop the bombs. Also whoever designed helicopters in real life what a chad.

Is a really good game but with the UI i can find anything im looking for and lags every time i do anything and i didnt lag before the update

It scratches the right itch for a nostalgic Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts player when it comes to sandbox vehicle-building games, but I can't shake the feeling that too much content is locked under poorly priced DLCs.

It's unthinkable to me being upselled so explicitly this way, and I seem to share this feeling among other players per review counts in the sub-products. I am never paying more than twice the starting price in extra content that should be part of the base game itself - with rare exceptions like Factorio, where they have tripled the game's value with Space Age, or well priced bundles for older stable (complete) games.

Why not simply throw in everything you made and have a killer product that becomes so widely used you make more money than any other choices? Take games like Factorio, Terraria, No Man's Sky. Let the community love and mod the heck out of your game, support it, grab the feedback loop and improve parts that brings most value, and suddenly you have millions of players, and each line of code you wrote is worth hundreds of dollars, instead of being overlooked and begging with undesirable alternate strategies.

There was only one or two DLCs when I bought it 2 years past release date to support the game, after trying it on Game Pass. I thoroughly regret the purchase, didn't have enough free time and priority to play it again on Steam ever since.

Software is called that for a reason, hoping for a better product down the line, a pass for now or maybe eternity. Will eventually play it for sure!

The game developers do not listen to the community and only add useless things that they want. For example tank tracks, hundreds if not thousands of people have asked the game developers for tank tracks but like usual they do not listen to their community. An example of not listening to their community is the new pioneers update, a new UI was added and the community did not like the new UI at all. People have begged for the UI to be reverted back to the original UI but the trailmakers developers stated "no the UI won't change. no we wont add a toggle for it. yes you will learn to love it."

Great game, and now is the best time to get into it due to the brand new campaign, and the overhaul of the UI that makes the UI much easier to understand for newer players. Many older players (myself included) have had complaints about the new update, but for new players the issues are negligible or even nonexistent for issues such as all our muscle memory being gone.
10/10, Amazing game that i cant wait to play more of!

It was a very good game, i did quite love it it was good and fairly simple, but with the 2.0 update, it brought many new thingss like cool new block, but the main bad thing about the new update, is the new UI

Ui change, made it more complicated, no reason to put it on the side.

devs unwillingness to allow us the option to use the old one, even going as far as to say

"you willl learn to love it" (actual line from them)

did not fix many of the issues and bugs that plague this game.

I love trailmakers, dont get me wrong the map is awesome, and new stuff is alright,

but trailmakers has had a trend of "for each good thing x update adds, 5 bad things come too"

The devs at Flashbulb are way too based. Dropping a massive campaign, adding a lot of new block, some massive QOL changes and a great soundtrack for free is just amazing

Dude, I absolutely loved this game so much and I have poured many hours into this game, but holy shit, the latest 2.0 update made me want to never touch this game ever again.

1. The new UI is so fucking bad, they promote it as cleaner and easier to use, but instead it now takes up 80% more of my screen and the categories are so unorganized.

2. All of my previous builds are now broken and instantly explode.

3. The campaign, lets be honest here, yes the map is cool, but every quest is so repetitive doing the same thing over and over. It really needed much more time and a better final boss than just destroying another pathetically easy to kill drill.

4. Transforming is now a ten step process and is so counteractive, if you simply delete the build in builder does not mean it should be taken out of the transform menu.

5. There are so many bugs in this unfinished mess, mechanical blocks all the sudden stop working, inputs not responding or things that shouldn't respond to those inputs, and just so many more things I am not going to write out.

6. Neglected every single thing that the fans begged them to add and instead gave us a half decent campaign, countless bugs, and a UI THAT NOBODY ASKED FOR.

In conclusion, I am probably not going to return to this game until the devs can get their act together and fix this pile of bs, and I recommend you to not either.

This game does not allow you to edit keybinds. Are you left-handed? Well, f you.

The new update is pure garbage in my opinion and I am sure many others agree with me. I also think that it kind of ruined the game, because I tried to play with the new ui but it is just no fun and way too complicated. It is really hard to play as somebody who has played the game for some time and it really hurts to see the game is such state. I do not understand why you had to change everything so much. It feels like a whole minute just to respawn. And why do I have to hold R just to repair. I do not undstand why these changes were made and I doubt that anyone wished for this. A solution in my opinion is an option to have the old UI back and get rid of that repair function because it makes no sence. Thank you for your understanding.