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Main Assembly review (early access)Aye, robot
Aye, robot
On the other hand, if you’ve got a healthy relationship with your own inadequacies – or worse still, actual competence – Main Assembly presents a deeply satisfying loop of seemingly unsolvable problems and your own hand-built solutions. For the mechanically inclined it’s an opportunity to flex whichever bit of your brain understands how torque works, a heaving toy box set inside a robust physical simulation, with a drag-and-drop programming interface so you can wire up your creations to do your bidding.
For the rest of us, this game is the manifestation of the idea that if something is stupid, but it works, then it’s not stupid. Need to lift a crate into a truck? Weld a pair of retractable prongs on the front of the go-kart you built for the previous challenge and give that a go. And if those prongs happen to catapult the crate into the harbour? Switch back into build mode, refine your machine, and try again. Fumbling your way to the simplest solution will still leave you with a cobbled together robot you’ll adore.
A simple and powerful visual programming interface lets you map the actions of individual robot parts to button presses and other inputs. In the most basic example, you can wire up the WASD keys to control acceleration and steering. At the more advanced end of things, you can attempt whatever the hell kind of electronics is making this player’s aeroplane fly.
There are a few issues. The tutorial walks you through the basics, but cuts you loose just at the moment things start getting really complicated. If you’re familiar with builder games and have a grasp of basic programming concepts, you’ll be able to intuitively figure out some of the trickier aspects, but novices will be in over their heads as soon as the tutorial dumps them back at the main title screen. There’s currently not a whole lot to actuallydowith robots you create either, besides drive them around in the challenge levels collecting stars.
And on a couple of occasions there seemed to be something irredeemably broken about my robot. Polygons of the chassis would extrude in unpredictable directions, surfaces would vanish so that the hollow insides of my robot were exposed to the world, and no amount of careful teasing of vectors could lift whatever curse had befallen it. The entire robot had to be euthanised and another built from scratch.
Such ghosts in the machine are thankfully rare, and this early access version feels otherwise highly polished. Main Assembly is great at understanding what it is you’re trying to do at any given moment. Drag the corner edge of a cube towards another part and it will weld them together, snapping on neat grid lines and tidying up any back facing polygons. Attach a pair of wheels and the game will automatically wire the steering up to your left analogue stick. And its physics engine is robust enough to cope with all manner of experimental oddness: high-speed collisions between moving parts, and whirring doodads jamming themselves into places they shouldn’t be.
There is an implicit contract between builder games and their players, a promise that if something doesn’t work properly it shouldn’t be the fault of a physics engine that can’t cope, but the robot design itself. Main Assembly lives up to this promise better than any other physics toybox I’ve used. It is a frictionlessly inventive playground, a lubricated luge track leading from your creative brain to the screen, so that your greasy ideas can slip effortlessly into reality, regardless of how puerile they may be.
