Nimbatus - The Space Drone Constructor

In this game you design space drones and then send them on missions to planetary surfaces where you pilot the drone to do things like destroy space monster eggs or retrieve an item.

THE GOOD:

• There are a decent variety of parts to experiment with.
• There is decent variety in the mission types, which requires you to do some problem solving to design the right types of drones.
• You can come up with some clever designs. I was particularly proud of my lifter drone that had automation allowing it to stay upright. Instead of thrusting forward like a plane, it could move left, right, up, or down, making it easy to approach and grab objects on the ground.
• You can test out your drone designs before sending them out into the field.

THE BAD:

• I tried really hard to like this game, but it's not very fun. There is too much frustration in the drone design and not enough fun in the missions.
• The heart and soul of this game is the drone construction, and it's deeply flawed. Each drone part can only connect to one other part, leading to strange and unstable drones where every part must connect to the center.
• The missions generally feel really long, and they're often not particularly interesting.
• There are often strange hiccups, like tiny pieces of land your drone gets stuck on.
• Mining for minerals feels repetitive pretty quickly.

THE UGLY:

• Drones will get shaky and vibrate due to a game engine glitch and you can't fix this by adding triangular braces.
• Certain objects were sliding up the magnet (when I was capturing them) and causing my drone to spin like crazy. It was really weird.