Brickadia

I came into Brickadia looking for the combat angle, and honestly the first thing that impressed me had nothing to do with guns - it was the engine. Running on Unreal Engine 5, the game delivers RTX global illumination and reflections at playable framerates even on maps loaded with millions of bricks. A friend tested it on an RTX 2060 Super at max raytracing settings and held smooth performance throughout. For a sandbox game that ships at a 1.5GB install size, that optimization work is genuinely unusual and worth calling out before anything else. The PvP side of Brickadia is community-authored rather than matchmade, which is the one thing that will either hook you or immediately turn you off. There is no ranked ladder, no matchmaking queue, no TTK spreadsheet to memorize. What you get instead is a flexible game rules system where server owners drop item spawns, ammo pickups, and weapon racks into their own builds to create deathmatch arenas. PvP is off by default - it only activates inside deathmatch minigames - so you are not getting griefed mid-build session. The shooting itself is arcade-first-person, functional rather than precision-tuned, and the server browser still feels like something from fifteen years ago. If you came here wanting a tightly balanced FPS, you are in the wrong game. The combat is a layer on top of the sandbox, not the foundation. What the foundation actually is: a logic-gate and wire system deep enough to build working circuits without writing code, hinges and rails for physics contraptions, support for up to 30 players building in real-time, a prefab gallery for sharing and importing entire creations, and Lua scripting that is currently in early rollout for players who want to go further. The building controls - undo/redo, copy, cut/paste, pipette, grid snapping, brick resizing, and an X-Ray editor mode for working on components hidden behind other bricks - are the tightest I have seen in any game of this type. Physics contraptions that actually work without rubber-banding or jitter is not a given in this genre. Here it mostly holds up. The downsides are real. Early Access means the game is incomplete, and the community has been vocal about bugs and crashes, particularly in multiplayer sessions with large builds or high player counts. Mod support is not in yet, which is a significant gap for a game that invites comparison to Garry's Mod. Game modes beyond freebuild and deathmatch are sparse right now, and the server browser's spartan presentation makes finding active servers harder than it should be. The developers have been transparent about the roadmap - terrain editing, expanded scripting, and full custom content import are all planned, with an Early Access exit targeted for end of 2026 - but that is a commitment to the future, not a feature you can play today. For a shooter specialist like me, Brickadia is fascinating specifically because its combat ceiling is defined entirely by what the community builds. The right deathmatch server with a well-designed arena and weapon placement can actually be a good time. But you are not picking this up for a polished competitive shooter experience. You are buying into a platform that happens to include shooting, built by a small team shipping real updates at a surprisingly fast cadence. If you have a crew who will actually build things together, the value proposition holds up considerably better than if you are a solo player hoping to find populated servers on demand. Fred, Scout Team