Steamroll: Rustless Edition

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Steamroll is a Puzzle game with gameplay that seems to be just a tad inspired by Mini-Golf. Released on PC in 2015, ported to Xbox One in 2019, and ported to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2021, Steamroll puts players in the role of a new employee at a mining operation who is controlling a “scarabeus”, a steam-powered spherical vehicle that can connect to emplacements throughout the game’s levels that enable it to use a turret that can fire smaller spheres, including specialty spheres that can carry explosives or deploy structures within the environment. Players must make use of these abilities to progress through the game’s levels.

Steamroll is graphically a pretty good-looking game, with some nice lighting, good textures, and pretty good destruction effects. Unfortunately, all of this comes at a cost on the underpowered Nintendo Switch, with the framerates dropping harshly and often. Rounding out this presentation is a cinematic soundtrack with some electric guitar to amp up the intensity of the gameplay, though mostly what you’ll be doing here doesn’t really call for that.

While the presentation has its share of issues, the gameplay here is mostly pretty good, with players moving their spherical vehicle around the game’s levels and slotting it into emplacements to fire off smaller spheres to hit switches, set up ramps, and so on. The game does a good job providing a good amount of variety for what you’re supposed to be doing in a given level, though sometimes what you’re meant to do isn’t exactly clear. Another frustration is the controls, which don’t really feel natural, and take a good deal of getting used to.

However, I think my biggest frustration with the gameplay was the inability to make small adjustments in aiming when setting up shots with the turret. Given the way turret aiming is designed to resemble mini-golf, having more precise aiming would have really helped to give players the feeling of lining up a perfect shot, rather than simply slotting in one of the positions the game allows for.

Still, the gameplay here is largely fine, and overall I think Steamroll is a well-crafted and fairly unique Puzzle game… but the terrible performance on the Nintendo Switch definitely makes this feel like a compromised version of the game, and players who own multiple platforms will probably be better off getting this game on one of those other platforms.

tl;dr – Steamroll is a Puzzle game that has you moving around a spherical vehicle and slotting it into emplacements to fire smaller spheres with its turret, solving each level’s puzzles to reach an exit. There’s some clever game design here, and some fun and unique gameplay, but in addition to a few issues with the controls, the Nintendo Switch version of the game suffers from some pretty nasty performance issues. This is still an excellent game, but if you have the choice you’re better off going with a different version of the game.

Grade: B-

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