Trailmakers: Pioneers is a strange game to review. It was originally released sans subtitle in 2018, and did pretty well with gamers. It reviewed well initially and continued to do so for several years, but for anyone looking for context or a campaign to support the base gameplay, it never fully delivered. It was a vehicle-building game then, where the primary loop involved crafting vehicles to drive, ride, fly, or sail and then exploring with them looking for new materials with which to improve. With this massive 2.0 Update, Trailmakers: Pioneers aims to add more depth to the experience.
Pioneers keeps the same core concept but adds a lot of new features to it, most notably the aforementioned campaign. You play a green recruit, recently made a Trailmaker and given the first task of delivering supplies to an alien planet. This being a video game, you arrive at said planet to find it in the grip of an invasion by the Botnak, aggressive machines waging war on the indigenous Froggits.
You’re tutorialised right away, taught how to scavenge materials and resources, how to craft new parts and components, and how to attach those components to a vehicle. The interface, despite improvements from the base game, still feels fiddly, with some imprecise placement caused by a sometimes stubborn camera, and no ability to invert controls in build mode, which felt disorientating for me – especially when you can invert them for the rest of the game.
Soon, you’re left to explore the world yourself, reaching settlements in need of help and doing what you can. Oddly, though, most settlements seem to want nothing more than for you to take something somewhere, or bring something back. Sometimes it’s goods, but sometimes it’s Froggits, meaning you need to build more seats for your car. Often it will lead to combat, too, necessitating shotgun mods and laser cannons. You can even add tractor beams to your buggy so you can hoover things up without disembarking.
The possibilities for building are vast, which makes it all the more frustrating that most of what you’re using vehicles for is fetch quests and fairly uninspired vehicle combat. It begs the question of why Flashbulb didn’t instead spend the time carving a fully-fledged sequel with a campaign worthy of its central conceit. Instead you get a game that becomes a little rote fairly quickly.
Part of the problem is the Froggits. They’re not particularly cute or helpful, and they communicate in nondescript warbles. It’s hard to relate to them or care much about them, and there never really feels like there are stakes. Yes I decided to help them out because the game presents no other options, but half the time I didn’t really care whether or not the Botnaks wiped them out.
Perhaps a little ironically, I found myself gravitating back to the Build Menu over and over again to develop my four slotted vehicles. Once you reach a point where you can create flying machines and speedboats, there’s way more fun to be had just driving and flying places. But without a real, need to do so, I struggled to remain engaged. Even boss fights couldn’t raise the excitement, as death is something you just shrug off and get on with it.
The building, though, is just so intuitive (dodgy controls notwithstanding), allowing you to build new parts on the fly, attach them wherever you want or save them for later. You won’t be able to build anything big at first, but you’ll soon begin to unlock upgrades that let you add larger and larger components. Quite often I’d only engage with the world and the Froggits when I needed more resources.
It’s not the best looking game on Steam, but Trailmakers: Pioneers has its moments of beauty. Some of the landscapes are nice if low detail, but the fast-paced vehicle combat helps keeps things interesting when exploring. It’s not always enough, sadly, and there’s really not enough in Trailmakers’ open world to make it worth exploring beyond hoarding materials.
Despite an attempt to add context and colour to the world, the best bit of Trailmakers: Pioneers is still the building. The story, such as it is, almost gets in the way, when it would have made a little more sense to forget the story and just build heavily on, well, the building. For a bit of low-rent, time-killing fun, it’s not a bad option, but if you’re hoping the campaign will add depth and stakes to proceedings, you might be disappointed.