Main Assembly Early Access Impressions
Purchasing a game in Early Access can be a crapshoot, but sometimes those gambles can pay off with great experiences that only become better before your eyes as development continues. It’s still early for Bad Yolk Games and Team17’s Main Assembly, which launched in Early Access last week, but the sandbox vehicle creation is shaping up to be something special.
Main Assembly‘s concept is very simple: create and pilot whatever you want, however you want. Assembling a vehicle can be quite complex, but Main Assembly offers a great Tutorial system that guides you through the basics and let’s you get comfortable with its suite of manipulation tools. The basics of vehicle creation come down to a chassis, motors, wheels, and a docking station. Your first creation will likely look like a soapbox derby car straight out of the scene from The Little Rascals (at least most of mine were), until you really master the bending and extruding tools to make your vehicle more aerodynamic. Eventually you’ll unlock pistons, boosters, propellers, and all sorts of other gadgets and then the creation suite really opens up.
From a controls standpoint, Main Assembly puts the control scheme completely in your hands with its nifty little programming tool. Once you’ve created your Frankenstein monster of a vehicle you’ll need to give it some brains, which is done using function block programming. In your program you will assign button inputs to each output of your vehicle, such as running your motor forward and backward with the W & S keys or triggers on a gamepad, or extending pistons on your forklift creation with the F key or the X button. This sounds simple enough, but the programming can get quite advanced if you’re motivated enough to keep at it.
In its current state of Early Access, Main Assembly offers 106 challenges to complete across six different levels. These challenges include crashing into crash test dummies that are sprinkled throughout the map, finding hidden stars, reaching a series of checkpoints in a time limit, and other random tasks. Some challenges give you complete freedom on what your vehicle will look like or weigh, but some will require your vehicle to fall under a certain weight category to keep things interesting.
The most intriguing thing about Main Assembly is there really is no limit to what you can create. A large chunk of my time with the game was spent downloading and trying out some of the creations from other Steam players using the Steam Workshop, and the Main Assembly community is already going strong with some incredible vehicles. From fighter jets and muscle cars to hovercrafts and propeller planes, it was amazing to see how in depth the creation tools can actually go. It was also a great resource to check out how each of the other players’ vehicles were programmed, which benefited my own creations as I progressed in the challenges.
Since Main Assembly is still in the infancy of Early Access there will likely be a ton of content added as the weeks and months go by, but what should they add to make this game an even better experience? One thing I would absolutely love is a destruction derby PVP battle arena to pit your creations against other players, with weight classes and categories to help level the playing field. All the tools are pretty much in place for something like that to be implemented, so hopefully that is a feature that’s being considered for sometime down the road.
Whether it’s spending hours creating your dream vehicle or simply piloting and reverse engineering other players’ creations, Main Assembly’s Early Access is absolutely worth the $20 price tag. The challenges are engaging and really make you think, and the assembly tools are accessible and can be as simple or as complex as you like. Main Assembly is definitely a game I’ll revisit frequently to track its progress and look forward to reviewing once the full version launches.
A Steam key for Main Assembly‘s Early Access was provided by Team17
