Game Review

R.A.K.E. review

It's a cute game. There are good things and bad things.

Let's start with the good.

-Very polished. Well presented. -Cute art. -A by-the-numbers incremental game.

The bad:

-It gets repetitive pretty fast. Even with upgrades, terrain it's just more scrap, more valuable and more upgrades that don't change much about the gameplay.

-I can't say for a fact that it was fun. I mostly played to unlock more content and see what else the game had, not because I was having a blast. The "timer" nature of the game is stressful, I don't know if it was the best design choice, maybe I'd count moves or fuel that runs out as you move. Of course it would need a redesign because all turn and move speeds would become useless, but having a timer forcing me to mathematically select optimal paths felt more stressful than fun.

-The pathfinding, the main mechanic of the game that you'll be using, is a bit weird and hard to predict. And as I said, the timer forces you to do it FAST. It's difficult to know which path it will take until you get the "optimal path" upgrade.

-It doesn't have automation. I played it for about 30 minutes and only got one automation robot, but the main robot is still manual.

-It's too formulaic. I've seen this game several times already with different skins: basically run a short level, upgrade the tree, run another short level, upgrade the tree, rinse and repeat. Either it's a robot collecting scrap, a fisherman collecting fish, or a miner mining ore... you get the idea. So the concept is not original and it doesn't bring anything new to the table.

-The cliffs are supposed to help me? I don't understand them yet, especially since there's an upgrade to add more cliffs. I found them to be annoying and I prefer flat lands because they'd slow my robot down with all that turning around the cliffs and lava spots.

-I encountered a bug where I was surrounded by three lava tiles and one cliff, so I couldn't move. Fortunately, the drone collected something and I just had to wait for the timer to end, but maybe check for blocked roads or patterns.