Nimbatus (Review)

Nimbatus: The Space Drone Constructor is a physics based simulation game set in entirely destructible procedurally generated galaxies. Developed and published by Stray Fawn Studios. Nimbatus is basically Besiege in space, you're faced with a seemingly simple objective and must build a machine (or in this case a drone) that fits the needs to complete said objective competently.

It takes time to learn the different parts and what they can be used for, but once you've figured it out you can move on to improving your drone until it's the best it can be. There's plenty to work with, aside from basic blocks you have heaters and coolers, shields, mechanical pieces like springs and magnets, sensors and automatic machine pieces you can use to make your drone fly itself, and of course a bunch of weapons. Building drones is what you'll spend most of your time doing, so it's a good thing the creation tools are quick and easy enough to use. The hard part about making a working drone is having to balance everything out, you need boosters to move and you need fuel to make them work, you then should probably put some weapons on your ship, but weapons need energy to power them. And now with all this extra weight you have to add more boosters in order to move or make turning fast enough, and it quickly becomes a balancing act.

Another set of parts involve resource gathering and storing, this is an important part of the game even though it's not an objective. Resources are gathered and brought back to the carrier ship to be used as currency to purchase upgrades for your weapons, upgrades require different types of materials that can each only be gathered with it's compatible parts. For example you must have a red storage container on your drone in order to collect red materials, many upgrades even take multiple types of material. This wasn't too much of a bother to me, but I can see this feeling very tedious to some. some of the more difficult missions will be very hard to complete without decent upgrades, so if you haven't paid much attention to resource gathering you're going to have to farm a bit.

There isn't a huge variety of mission objectives but since this is currently an early access title I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that there will be more added in the future, however a few of the mission types are more annoying than they should be in my opinion. For example one objective has you collecting barrels of toxic waste off the planet, which sounds easy enough. But the planet is heavily protected and said barrels are often placed on top of turrets that end up destroying them as soon as you fly by, that is if you don't destroy them yourself while shooting at these defenses. This is by far the most enraging mission type and it definitely needs a lot of work or maybe it would be better if it was taken out of the game entirely, it single handedly brought down my opinion of the game and I dreaded having to do these missions.

Other missions give you orders to destroy transmitters on planets defended by turrets, destroy giant snake eggs (which causes the massive mother snake to chase you back into space), sumo wrestle other players creations (this is the most fun of the bunch), and a few others. Each mission takes place on a different planet, each consists of one of a few different terrains. There's ice-y planets, lava planets, bug infested hive like planets, etc. As far as procedural generation goes I didn't see much of a difference in how the planets are formed, I even started a second game to see how much would change and it was pretty much identical (So don't get too excited).

There's a few things that dragged down the fun for me, those being constantly having to do toxic barrel missions (by far the biggest problem) and a bug where my drone would get stuck on terrain that seemingly wasn't there, this happened most often when digging and usually on the snake egg missions (I'm not sure why). If these things could be fixed I think I would have much more fun playing the game, even though I don't know what I'm doing with my drones half the time.

I'm not very good at building more complicated machines so I didn't get too far through the first galaxy, but I did have fun trying to make a decent drone. If you go into this expecting grand space battles and exploration, you'll probably going to be pretty disappointed. But if you're really creative and love simulation games like Besiege, than you're going to have a great time with Nimbatus. With plenty of tools to make amazing things and the potential to be massively expanded on, Nimbatus (while slightly underwhelming with it's small variety of missions) may just be your new favorite space simulation game. Nimbatus is available for $19.99 on Pc/Steam.