Trailmakers: High Seas Expansion (DLC)

Trailmakers: High Seas is a paid expansion for the build-and-race sandbox Trailmakers, and it does exactly what a good expansion should: it takes the core loop and drops it into a setting that demands you rethink everything you know about building. The base game rewards tinkering with land vehicles and flyers; High Seas throws a massive ocean map at you and says good luck. Suddenly you need hulls that don't flip, propellers that push underwater, and enough buoyancy to survive the kind of rolling waves the new weather system throws at you without warning. The map itself is the headline feature. Flashbulb describes it as the biggest in the game's history, and it feels it. You start in warm southern tropics with gentle water and scattered islands, then push north into colder, rougher territory. There is a vertical dimension too: the seafloor hides treasure caches that require you to build something that can actually dive and maneuver in three dimensions. That single design choice opens up a whole extra category of builds that casual players probably never attempted before, and it is genuinely rewarding when your first cobbled-together submarine actually holds pressure and finds a chest. For a group session this expansion has real legs. Co-op and online PvP are both supported, and the open ocean creates natural PvP arenas in a way that a flat land map never quite manages. Racing a friend across open water in vessels you both built from scratch, while a squall rolls in and starts tossing both of you around, is the kind of chaotic fun that makes people want to run one more round. Steam Workshop support means the community keeps pumping in new vessel designs, so if someone in your crew struggles to build anything seaworthy they can grab a template and still participate. Full controller support is confirmed, which matters for couch co-op sessions on a big TV. On the practical side: this is DLC, not a standalone game, so you need Trailmakers itself. There are no Metacritic scores or aggregated Steam reviews to lean on at the time of writing, which makes judging the expansion's reception tricky. What is clear from Flashbulb's track record is that the base game is well-optimised for controller play and the building system is accessible enough that non-engineers can produce functional (if ugly) vehicles within an hour. High Seas does not reinvent that accessibility, it just points it at water and adds weather drama. If the base game clicked for you, this is more of the same creative chaos with a new dimension literally added. The main caveat is audience fit. If you burned out on Trailmakers because building felt too fiddly, this expansion will not fix that. And if pure racing is your thing, the open-ocean format is more exploration sandbox than tight circuit. But for players who love the "what if I built a thing" loop, especially in a group where everyone is improvising and laughing at each other's disasters, High Seas is a solid reason to reinstall.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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