I feel like I’ve played quite a few Survivorslikes of late, and they can really end up a little too cookie-cutter to ever stick in my mind. Vampire Survivors nails it because it’s the first of its kind, and Megabonk does so because it has leaderboards, in 3D and adds a jump button, which feels like an absurd sentence but here we are. TerraTech Legion nails it by letting you build up your very own war machine from blocks you collect as you defeat enemies and level up. It’s just so preposterously fun.
Look, you all probably know the drill by now, but let’s cover the basics. You’re a big vehicle in TerraTech Legion, but you still drive around and your weapons shoot automatically at enemies, you collect experience from them, and then you level up and get stronger, and so on. The fighting is the same as you would expect from the genre, but that’s really just the beginning.
Instead of just picking your weapons and levelling them up, you also get new blocks you can expand your vehicle with, by adding on full-blown weapons platforms, extending out arms covered in saw blades, and all sorts of other nonsense. You even get to change the types of wheels you’re using, and can just keep adding more of them if you want to.
I don’t think I’ve had as much fun slapping stuff together since I played Mothergunship in VR. You can move stuff around and reconfigure your vehicle whenever you level up, allowing you to completely change how your vehicle performs and looks with ease, adding on buffs, and figuring out how to not mess things up. You see, each weapon has a range it can attack in along with firing arcs it can shoot at. If you put weapons too close to each other, they can end up blocking your own attacks, making it a lot harder to actually get the most out of your space car.
It helps that you also have a boost to play with, which sounds so silly, but performs very different depending on which character you’re using. Sure, you can perform ramming attacks, but one character phases out of reality while boosting, allowing you to escape from pesky hordes by simply driving through them. It’s an amazing little tweak on things, and you can upgrade each of the characters using their own skill tree too.
The levels you can run through have different difficulty modes to take on as well, and each of those has different objectives to complete to actually further your progress through the game. It basically encourages you to do different things, like focusing on destroying specific objects, or using certain characters. It just all works really well, and it looks fantastic to boot.
