Servonauts

Genre: Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Untold Tales)

Servonauts, released in 2024 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is a co-op-focused Arcade-style Party Game in the same style as games like Overcooked where players are scrambling to accomplish a goal together. In this case, that takes the form of players acting as robots on an intergalactic gas station, trying to get the right kind of gas to vehicles by connecting hoses to various parts of each level’s environment.

The presentation here is appealing, with the game’s intro designed to seem like a sort of pseudo-retro-style corporate advertisement, and with the game itself using decent, colorful 3D visuals that get the job done without being especially noteworthy. Although I do have to point out one creative element, where hoses you’ve requisitioned pop out of tubes like Christmas crackers complete with confetti and celebratory noises. It’s a nice touch that I wish this game played on more often, though I will admit it does get tiresome hearing it happen every time you summon a hose, which is extremely often in this game.

For the gameplay itself, Servonauts does a really good job balancing the helpful and chaotic elements of the best co-op games, really demanding good communication from all its players, especially as it’s very easy for poor communication to cause players to accidentally sabotage each other, or for one player to inadvertently screw things up for everyone else.

A lot of this comes down to limited resources, and by that I don’t mean the fuel – that at least is infinite, flowing out of open pipes to show everyone what type of fuel is connected. No, I mean a limited number of outlets – each source of fuel has only one plug for a hose, and color-changing stations you can summon and install have only two (one to feed into it and one to feed out from it). On some levels you have splitters that give you more outlets to work with, and you can on occasion get splitter stations you can install to give you more output to work with, but barring that you just need to learn to take turns using it for one task and then another.

At its core, the process is simple – use the hoses to get the fuel to the vehicle that needs it. If the vehicle uses a specific color, feed the fuel into that color station to change the flow into said color. If one color fuel is fed into another color station, the two colors mix. So to get purple fuel to a vehicle demanding purple, you need to connect a hose to the fuel output after drilling in an output station, then connect the other end of the hose to a color station (blue or red), and then adding another hose to that color station to feed it into the remaining color, adding one final hose to bring that output to the vehicle. Then you need to mix it all up for the next vehicle, which may need yellow fuel or just plain black fuel, possibly in a completely different location that you can’t quite reach without connecting the hose to a pipe or something.

Okay, maybe that didn’t seem simple all written down like that, but it’s easy enough to figure out while you’re playing… though it’s another thing actually doing it when you have four vehicles simultaneously demanding four different kinds of fuel and four players each scrambling to take care of different things and maybe not keeping track of how their actions are affecting others.

All of this so far is honestly great, it’s what I look for in co-op games like this, but there are a few things that take it down a notch. First, this game is really finicky about which hose you’re picking up or swapping in, especially if there are multiple hoses close to each other (which happens frequently). It can be extremely frustrating to try to connect one hose to an open port only to find you’ve swapped it in for a nearby port, a hose you needed to remain in place.

Another issue is that the bonus items you receive in this game are poorly explained, and the icons indicating what they are is difficult to distinguish. An extra splitter can be an absolute godsend, but it’s hard to tell when you get a box whether that’s what you’ve actually gotten, or if it’s some other thing.

Because of these frustrations, Servonauts doesn’t reach the same heights as Overcooked, which is a shame because at times it seems to come close. There’s some real clever gameplay here, and the co-op element is really well done. But I can’t ignore the fact that half the time when you do the game’s most frequent interaction, trying to attach a hose to something, it doesn’t seem to work how you intend it to. And while this generally only makes for a second or so of frustration and confusion, that adds up over the course of the game. Co-op fans will still probably want to give this a try though – despite this frustration, there’s a lot of zany co-op fun to be had here.

tl;dr – Servonauts, is a co-op-focused Arcade-style Party Game vaguely similar to Overcooked, where players are robots trying to get the right kind of gas to vehicles in a gas station by connecting hoses to various machines. The core concept here is great, making for some really good co-op play. Unfortunately, this is undermined somewhat by imprecise controls at times. However, even with these issues, co-op fans may still want to give this one a look.

Grade: B-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Arcade / Party Game

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