Balsa Model Flight Simulator
(Also put 230 hours into the public playtest prior to EA, quite confident this will become my most played game by quite a lot)
Haven’t even touched career yet, or done much with the scenario editor. I’ve just been completely captivated by making and flying planes. If you can think of something or find an existing design that seems feasible you can probably make it, and you can even come with new ideas that no one has thought about before and make them work.
This has replaced all other flight sims for me, MSFS may be beautiful and have great wind simulation etc, but I can’t fly and build my own designs which I’d much rather do. The community aspect of this is great too, seeing all the weird and wonderful designs that people come up with is always entertaining to me, and the mix of friendly dogfighting and chill flying around together is just great.
– Real player with 285.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Building Sandbox Games.
Balsa is one of those games that is up and coming with afterburners lit. Ignore the fact there are no afterburners (yet).
Multiplayer - Check
Weapons - Check
Creative Design Options - Check
Modding - Check
A Dev Team that LISTENS - Check
Keep in mind, this game is in Early Access. This means the game is developing, growing and has potential ONLY limited by feedback provided to the developers. The team even released a modding kit that allows for building mods already. I have been able to create several custom designed propellers, fuselages, and fuel\battery tanks and used them in game.
– Real player with 154.7 hrs in game
Stormworks: Build and Rescue
the game is generally good and i enjoy playing it but it has its fair amount of downsides too, but i am only making this review to complain that they changed how rocket fuel tanks looks, because it seems that they failed to realize that players have been using the rocket fuel tanks for decoration and now when it became simplified it just looks stupid. and there is no way to use the old ones. :(
– Real player with 2347.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Building Sandbox Games.
Honest review from someone who has put a huge amount of time into this game
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Badly optimised, crashes are fairly common.
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Multiplayer mostly unplayable due to desync between clients.
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Base game content is lacking after they pulled the original missions
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Original purpose of the game entirely lost and forgotten by the devs based on a single discord poll
As much as I had no issues with the weapon DLC coming as it could’ve added some real great additional content but sadly the entire focus has been on the weapons.
– Real player with 588.9 hrs in game
SimplePlanes
Easily one of my top 5 games of all time.
There is so much I like about this game, and for the price, its a great deal.
Pros-
Building planes - It takes practice to build good planes, but they are not too hard
Flight Physics- Except for the occasional bug, the Physics work reletivaly well, and have enjoyable flying
Damage Model- Its pretty basic, but it gets the job done. It is fun to go blast your creation out of the sky with a missle
Mods- There are some incredible mods out there, from adding in custom missions, to making the game actually look cinimatic.
– Real player with 1335.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Building Sandbox Games.
I will definately recommend this game. It may look like one of those smaller games that is fit for a phone, but it is not. It has so much to offer, that is, if you have creativity in your mind. It is one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. I bought it at a discount one day, thought to myself, “ehh, ill try it.” I’m so glad I did. In my opinion it has the best customization tools in any game. With a few simple mods, the customization in the editor is endless. You can create an exact copy of any real-life plane if you spend enough time, albeit it is time consuming when building. But in the end, it is worth it. The feeling is great when you spend three weeks perfecting a plane and it takes off for the first time. Also, the ability for us to share planes is AWESOME! I love checking out other people’s planes, it gives me ideas for what to build next. It is an ALMOST perfect game. why almost? there are just a few things that I would love to see:
– Real player with 339.7 hrs in game
Flying Things
Flying Things is a first-person builder VR game that will accelerate your creativity!
For thousands of years, the biggest human dream was to fly and feel the birds' freedom. Leonardo da Vinci, George Cayley, or the third Wright brother? Enter our low-poly dreamland and become one of them, creating the best flying machine ever.
To make your plane move, you must move as well! Just pick some levers, reels, and do some pulling and spinning. It sure will do the work, but the question is - how motivated are you to beat your own records?
Acceleration is the key, but well… Without some wings, propellers, and a proper body, the challenge might get harder than you’d like it to be. Luckily, we have a garage filled with all the necessary plane parts (and friendly robots, ready to help whenever you would need them)! Decide which ones do you want to use and assemble them as you like!
Decorate it with colored sprays and additional parts if you want to see your artistic part taking over. To fly with style is to fly high!
Ready? Set? Go! Will you fly to another island? Or will you drown with your masterpiece?
Features
Build how you want
As a creator, you can mix and match the pieces without any restrictions.
Discover new possibilities
Use over 25 unique elements to construct your flying thing. You can use them in countless ways!
Set the new record
Fly to the farthest spot and beat your previous record! Feel the wind in the most immersive build-and-fly game to date.
Test many designs to find the best one
Improve your design or try all over again with a different concept. Ther is no fixed recipe for the perfect plane!
Objectives
Explore Flying Things garage and meet your little robotic helpers.
Match different parts and use some decorating to create your original vehicle.
Make your way through the ramp and fly as far as possible using both hands to accelerate the machine.
Upgrade your plane by applying a new design that will help you set another record.
Create your own tournaments and compete with friends and family.
No strings attached! No rules. The physics itself will verify your concept in action.
SimAirport
After almost 300 hours of play, I’ll give it a rating after all. Unfortunately, it’s not enough for a positive one. There are a lot of well implemented things in this game, but the negative points destroy the overall picture in the end.
Positives:
The game runs very stable even with many mods.
The controls are intuitive and logical. The menus are very clear.
Many aspects of the airport are nicely implemented. For example, I have many options to design the security section. There are not only prefabricated security boxes, but I can build individually without getting lost in micromanagement.
– Real player with 298.4 hrs in game
Although overall this game does its job of being an airport builder/simulation/management game, and I enjoyed the progression of starting off with a small airport (or starting off with a blank slate), expanding its size, and then eventually building a large airport that covers the whole map with hundreds of flights a day, I can’t recommend this game because there are just too many bugs that you may encounter (I have encountered all of these at one time or another). For those who want to achieve a ‘perfect’ airport, where everything flows smoothly, these bugs will make you want to give up and quit. Honestly, it’s quite ironic and laughable that there is a bonus for ‘Perfect Ops’ (no delays or passengers missing flights in a whole day) in this game because once you reach an airport of a certain size, I’ve had so many times where a Perfect Ops streak has been ruined because of one or more bugs which cause unnecessary delays. When I look around online in search of solutions for these bugs the solutions are usually ‘reload your save’ or ‘send it to the devs and get it repaired’ which I don’t think are necessarily appropriate for a game which is considered released and no longer in early access. No, I haven’t installed any mods, played the ‘Edge’ version, or edited my save file, so this is a pure vanilla save/game.
– Real player with 128.9 hrs in game
Airport CEO
This is theoretically a very good and fun game. The mechanics are certainly towards the easier end of the spectrum, but there’s enough depth and variety to keep things interesting. I would absolutely love to give this game a thumbs up for it’s mechanics and central gameplay loop. I would put in far more hours if it would allow me to.
I give it a thumbs down because as more and more features and mechanics were added, bugs were not focused on or managed anywhere remotely well enough. It’s incredibly rare to go more than 15-30 minutes without something breaking and requiring a restart, even with a small airport. Months ago, there were still frequent game breaking bugs fixable by restarts, but you could go a couple hours in between (except with massive airports). Most of the time, it was just the pathfinding system deciding to check out and needing a kick. Now it seem like every system just breaks anytime you look at it.
– Real player with 394.3 hrs in game
First off let me say that the game is in Alpha, and the Devs still seem to be very active at this point, and that is why I am giving this an overall recommended tag. Now thats over with let me go into a bit of detail, and show what I see as good (or even potential) and the bad (or frustrating).
I have built a few aiports in the game, and each time I keep hitting the same conclusions:
- This is an airport sim, and if you are like me the details matter. The Devs have gone to the lenghts of allowing us to plot out taxiways to each stand, but then not allowed directional control of the taxiways. So planes will use what they feel like, and this always causes major log jams when you scale up the airport.
– Real player with 362.3 hrs in game
Dieselpunk Wars
I think I am the player who has been playing this game for the longest time ever (most of them spent on building stuff in creative), and I did enjoy it and had high hopes. But still…
Abandonware
Several serious bugs exist, including one that makes airships pretty much unplayable.
The Devs have been informed of those bugs for months but no action was ever taken.
They also stated on Discord that the May update is going to be the last update, so consider it officially abandoned.
Severe Lack of Content
– Real player with 466.8 hrs in game
A very good game.
Important notes:
Movement:
Movement on the ground for wheeled/tracked vehicles is generally pretty good, the only issue i tend to have is the velocity being canceled completely by trees/random geometry such as rocks. Movement also feels very slow/tanky however i think that fits the game just fine. Sea/Air movement works perfectly well, though i couldn’t get a walker to work.
Building/UI/Keybinding:
I have a few nitpicks about it, namely with not enough keybinds/options for keybinds in the building menu, and not being able to press esc to exit out of some menu prompts. There are some bugs here, as you might guess from an early access game, but aside from the occasional incorrect mirroring, it works just fine.
– Real player with 65.8 hrs in game
Sky Haven
Short Review: It’s a quality game but read the game description carefully before you buy. It does exactly what it says there: you aren’t running an airline; you aren’t running an entire airport; you aren’t running the terminal - all you are really doing here is planning out the ground handling operations for an airport and watching the simulation run.
Detailed Review: I’ve played Sky Haven for 200 hours so I feel like I have a pretty good feel for the game now. I’m giving it a thumbs up because it does what it does well and I have found that if you play it right and play it slow with careful planning and patience it runs without glitches. That’s a great feat for this stage.
– Real player with 204.3 hrs in game
Lovely game, incredible progress. As an avid SimAirport and Airport CEO player, I enjoyed the game greatly.
Edit: This is no longer an issue, was patched a week after I wrote the review (yeah for responsive Developers!)
One challenge that I [had] found difficult to overcome is avoiding deadlocks caused by traffic jams. My tips are: 1. For planes, set up your ramps with an inbound runway set to arrivals only, a taxi way that leads only to ramp stands entrance. A second network of taxi ways on the outbound part of the ramps to a departure runway. If you make a typical airport layout the planes will not always pick the best route, don’t have affinity for proximity or appropriateness of runway, and won’t re-route themselves if they are stuck. 2. For vehicles, the airport terminals get bunched up frequently. To reset you have to kick out the airplane they’re blocked from servicing. I found making a low ramp to terminal ratio, and setting the roads in a perpendicular angle to the direction of travel to the ramp helped.
– Real player with 96.9 hrs in game
Airmen
This is definitely one of my favorite games. It has elements comparable to Robocraft, Scrap Mechanic, Avorion, From the Depths, Besiege, Space Engineers, and other similar games, as well as World Adrift, Guns of Icarus, and Elite Dangerous, with a bit of Escape from Tarkov mixed in. You build a vehicle in a hangar and take that vehicle out into an open world, where you can gather resources and encounter other players before extracting your ship and returning to your hangar to fine-tune a design, or unlock research to facilitate different designs.
– Real player with 1525.4 hrs in game
Airmen
It took me quite some time to find a new online game which included what I was looking for, with Airmen I have finally found it. The game is set in a steampunk setting and consists mainly of two game modes: building ships and using them in an open world. Neither mode is obligatory, as you can also use pre-build ships or play single-player, however I think the combination of building your own ships and using them is what makes this game so enjoyable.
The Archipelago
One important aspect which I was looking for in a game (and which was somewhat difficult to find), is that it is an online game that has some challenges, but is not just about fighting. Instead here you have a variety of missions and quests you can pursue, including delivery, harvest and rescue missions, which often don’t require you to fire a single shot, even in the open world. You do also have the choice of hunt, capture or siege missions, which task you with defeating a certain enemy. Being an open world, you can also encounter other players with hostile intentions, the majority of the player base is friendly though. Apart from flying your own vessel, you can also join another captain on theirs, which is recommended especially for beginners.
– Real player with 1290.3 hrs in game
Custom Machinery
I like building games a lot so I wanted to have a go at this;
Pros:
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At first it seemed like you can’t really do anything but as you try stuff and learn how it works, you can build cool things
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Most blocks have 3 sizes
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Saving/copying your builds can be done quickly
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Not expensive
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Nice graphics
Cons:
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Hard to learn (I recommend you to watch tutorial videos. Link to tutorials )
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New players may not find the controls easily (They can be found by pressing F1)
– Real player with 3.5 hrs in game
No way to flip over if you get stuck.
No on-screen controls. F1 shows a transparent list of keys to remember. You are instructed to go to the YouTube channel for tutorials rather than having them in the game. If the developer simply put keys on-screen, it would be much easier to get into.
4 small wheels will provide an excessive amount of thrust by default, and do not require any sort of engine, or even hinges to rotate. There also aren’t any arrows telling you which way they spin or turn.
The only issue with balancing I had was trying to assemble a vehicle without it falling over. The ‘magnetic clamp’ or whatever, wasn’t.
– Real player with 0.6 hrs in game