Brickadia Is An Incredible Sandbox Builder That Succeeds On The Steam Deck - Early Access Preview

If you haven't yet, follow us on X (Twitter), Mastodon, or Bluesky to know when we post new articles, and join our Reddit or Subscribe to us on YouTube to check out our content and interact with our awesome community. Thank you for supporting us!

Brickadia was provided by the developers. This is an early access game as well, so content and performance are subject to change as the game is worked on.

Throughout my days, I like to go through Twitter/X and check out what is happening in the industry. With all the negativity in the industry, I find it relieving to see the positivity coming from people like Parris and Kahlief from Spawn on Me, and there are tons of great games there that I discover. One of those games I came to learn about is Brickadia, an upcoming sandbox builder that immediately interested me when I saw a giant Trebuchet throw hundreds of tiny blocks that would bounce around everywhere, and I just had to check it out.

I reached out to the developers and got the chance to play around with it ahead of its early access release, trying out different modes, playing around with their sandbox and building features, and looking at what insane contraptions people could build with the physics and wire-logic systems. And of course, I had to check out how it would run on the Steam Deck, which left me pleasantly surprised with how well it runs.

As I stated before, this is a sandbox game, so how you play is completely up to you. You can create your own world and choose to start on different presets, then go through your catalogue, find the right Lego-esque blocks you need, and start building. You can bring up the catalogue of different building blocks you can use with ease and drag them to your inventory to use, and from there, the world is your oyster. There is a solid amount of basic options to build semi-detailed buildings, like regular bricks and plates, along with some more specialty options, like doorframes, fences, plants, and pots.

I tried to build my own places, and I remembered I am really not a builder at all, but I did join some public servers and saw just how insane some buildings can get. I joined a server where people are building a Cyberpunk city, and it just looks incredible. There are multiple different tools to help with building, like the Painter to change their colors, Resizer to fine-tune the size of your blocks, and Applicator to change the properties of each individual block. This can get pretty detailed with ways to change what can collide with it or adding audio tracks or making it into a big button to activate a contraption.

However, I do appreciate the quality of life features that are here. The ease of dragging while placing bricks and Resizer tool to adjust them makes it significantly easier to build. I also like how we can toggle the inventory and switch from first to third-person at any time. It's nice to have these options and I am glad they are here.

On top of that, we aren't limited just to buildings. We have the interactive physics objects to build different vehicles, from cars to boats to jet skis. It's pretty insane how detailed it can get with the physics and wire system that work so well together. There are different joints, wheels, and balls that can be used when you're building your world. I have seen huge contraptions being built, like working trains, and it's pretty amazing.

All of this can be done with friends live. Once you create your world, you can set it to public and have other people in your world building along with you. You can build towns together, race tracks, vehicles, and it makes the experience so much more fun. One of the things I most look forward to doing is bringing in friends to build out maps to have full-on gunfights in with objects that can move and change the battlefield.

Yes, that's right. The game has a multitude of guns, melee weapons, and explosives to set down and use to take out your friends. There are way more weapons included than I expected, which can make for some interesting scenarios. I appreciate having these options here, giving us the chance to create different sandbox-esque game modes. Races and gunfights are two of the most obvious, but I could see so many more being built with the logic systems in place.

Even though you will be playing with friends, you don't all have to look the same! There are a solid number of customization options to change how you look, and it can help make you stand out and express yourself accordingly. Personally, I love the Egg head or Mini Pilot with my bunny slippers, so stylish. I look forward to seeing more options for the Torso and Head, which are quite lacking compared to the rest, but there will be more customization options added throughout early access.

There are enough tools already to build to your heart's content, and there are more plans in place to expand this. According to their early access section on the Steam store page for Brickadia, they plan to increase the library of bricks to use, flesh out behaviors and the wire logic system, allow for terrain editing, and importing your own custom content, all while optimizing to support better performance and larger worlds. From what I have played so far, it's pretty wild what can already be done, so I am looking forward to seeing what else will come throughout development.

I also want to commend the developers for how well they optimized the game on the Steam Deck. It runs wonderfully, and I was playing at a cool 60 FPS when doing my own things and trying out worlds, like the castle and shooting range, solo. I only saw one drop below 60 in the extremely large, complicated Cyberpunk world with tons of people on it, but that makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, I would consider the game very well optimized and very playable in terms of performance.

Controller support is also pretty well implemented, though it does need some work. You will have to manually change your controller scheme to Gamepad + Joystick Trackpad, but the game does have it in already. Everything feels solid to use, from bringing up the catalogue to changing out which tools and items you have in your hands. There are some areas that I needed to get more used to, like driving and switching through the hotbar of items, but it's doable.

Luckily, even though there are some small oddities here and there, I can confirm the developers are working on it and care about Steam Deck support. They made sure the Steam Deck is supported and performing well before the launch, which I can definitely confirm, and they are working on iterating the controls to make them as solid as possible. They are going to be working on optimizing for the Deck moving forward as well to make it great to play on the go, and I am elated to hear this. I would say it's already pretty amazing on Deck, so I can only imagine it being even better.

So far, the future is bright for Brickadia. This is one of the more stable, well-made early access releases I have seen in a long time, with a good chunk of content that can easily justify the price point. The amount of different contraptions, game modes, and buildings that can be created is immense, and doing it all with friends would be so much fun. It started to remind me of my early Garry's Mod days, and I can't wait to rekindle that love further playing with friends as we build ourselves a stadium to host our own duels.

Brickadia is now available in early access for $29.99.

If you enjoyed this article, check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that will help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got you covered!