Well, one is full of glue-less kits…*
:D
So I’m not sure what I was expecting with the game Model Builder, the work of what seems like a very small dev team (maybe in Poland?) published by Green Man Gaming. Yes, that GMG! I had no idea, but apparently they’ve published a fair few games over the past year or so.
My very initial impressions weren’t good. I spent a lot of time fighting the game’s camera control interface to get just the right angle on assembling or painting model parts. It still can be sometimes annoying, but I got the hang of it after one rage quit (and nearly rage uninstall and refund) in about 10 minutes. It’s not as hard as I was making it out to be, but your mileage may be similar or not.
The game has two modes – a “career mode” which is essentially a very long tutorial and skill builder. Then there’s sandbox, which is more open ended but which also allows you to set your own goals to make your own kind of less linear “career” than career mode.
I’ve still mostly played career mode so far. In it, I’ve built four models, the first three of which were fairly easy, but with ramping difficulty (you don’t even bother with painting your first model!) By the third model you’re doing a fairly simple assembly and fairly simple first full paint job, and…yeah, I felt a sense of accomplishment when I finished that Mad Max-style car. Sue me. It was really enjoyable to make.
And then the difficulty builds off skills learned there. The game introduces you to a variety of model-building and painting techniques – currently I’m doing a lot of dry-brushing and wet-washing on textured surfaces – that I’m only vaguely aware of from watching youtube videos of actually talented people painting miniatures and such.
I’ve been checking around, and apparently right now the game comes with 17 models to build. Which seems a bit limited, at least on the surface. But let me tell you – I’m currently in my 4th hour of my build of the fourth model in the career/story/tutorial mode. And I probably easily have another 90 minutes to 2 hours left. And the devs have promised more models are coming, though whether those will be paid DLC (hahaha, of course they will be, or at least some of them will be; I guess my real wondering is the price) I haven’t seen yet whether the game will support mods, but if someone can figure that out, look out below.
If I’m trying to assess whether this game is any good or not, I think more than most games I play, it comes down to a matter of perspective. I remember when Guitar Hero was HUGE, and seeing skilled actual guitar players just baffled by the popularity of the game. And I get that point of view! But…
…some folks aren’t blessed with the combination of patience, dexterity, or artistic vision to ever be able to play “Back in Black” on a guitar. And Guitar Hero offers a chance to get a taste of the experience of accomplishing that, and that’s an ultra seductive (see what I did there?) gameplay “reward” that’s hard to define but very, very real.
And I think that’s what I do very much like about my first 5-6 hours in Model Builder. Ican remember 8-year-old me standing the toy department of Sears, staring with the kind of hopping back-and-forth from one foot to another energy that only 8-year-old boys can muster, at the shelf of Aurora Monster Model Kits. (As seen in both Salem’s Lot and Stranger Things, btw.) Those kits I don’t think required great skill to assemble, but maybe more skill (and certainly patience!) than my 8-year-old fingers could manage. And to make them look as kick-ass as the box, you had to paint them. Which for my levels of skill with a paintbrush since early years: LOL.
But I’ve always been envious of the skill of model builders and minatures builders who can really make fantastic-looking creations. I marvel at them. I lurk with envy in QT3’s miniatures painting thread. I’d love to be able to do those things. And I know that perhaps if I laid out the cash for the proper tools and set up a proper workbench and set aside time to really try to do model-building right, perhaps with perseverance and practice I could develop some skills. But it’s far more likely, I think, that I’d do all those things and lay out the time and money and discover I was still crap at it all.
And so Model Builder scratches that itch. Suddenly I’m not a ham-fisted doofus where model cement bulges out from the seams of every piece I try to build. Where the pieces I paint aren’t blotchy and uneven. Where “flesh-colored” paint doesn’t accidentally extend haphazardly down the sleeves of the shirts of miniatures from the tiny, tiny hands. With Model Builder, I can actually do some shit.
Which brings me to the main reason I think I really like this game and hope that it has more models in store and where I’ll be the dumb sucker who happily forks over money for DLC in the future. The game rewards you for exercising some skill at building your virtual models.
When I play a “Something Something Simulator” game, often things are pretty simplified. When you have to knock out a wall and build a new master bath in House Flipper, the process of doing that in game glosses over a lot of the skillfulness required to, say, do a finished basement and add a bedroom. (I still love House Flipper, but it definitely is very simplified on the details.)
But what really draws me back to Model Builder is the way it rewards meticulousness and skill. I could slop paint all over the dragon figurine build and probably get a decent score there and move the career mode forward. Sure I could.
What I really WANT to do though – and which the game lets me do and rewards me for doing – is to spend hours (literally) touching up paint with an airbrush here and there. Going back over spaces with a white-paint dry brush. Brushing on some more dark wash for some crevasses. Carefully tilting and zooming in the camera like I was using those cool strap to your head magnifier headsets with the led lights in them, so that I can sneak a brush into a tough-to-reach space…not because anyone is likely to ever see it, but because I’ll know that it’s there if I don’t.
And (I think) the end result is this: two people playing Model Builder can assemble and paint the same kit, and one person’s end product is likely to look a lot different (and better or worse) than the other person’s. And for me, that’s the real payoff here, what really makes this game worth playing; that’s the hook.
So yeah, in the end my first 6 hours impressions of this are very favorable, with caveats that I don’t know if there are enough models here (or variety of models) for every taste out there. I’ll keep playing and report as I experience more models during play. I do know that in the forums on Steam, a developer mentioned that there are some models you can only build in career mode, so I’d recommend starting there – everything else being equal.
*This lame dad joke gleefully stolen from the reaction online to England’s match with Argentina in the 1998 World Cup: “How is David Beckham like an Airfix snap-together model? Well, one’s a glueless kit…”