Yellow Helmets

Building sites are not usually the kind of place you visit to have fun, because there’s a lot of work involved when it comes to erecting a new building, or even destroying an old one. However, using bulldozer and excavators can be pretty entertaining, especially if you do not have to worry about consequences. Thanks to video games, you now have the chance to do just that.

Yellow Helmets is a sandbox game in which your only purpose is to try and have some fun by yourself, without rules or missions. This is partly because the game is still early in its development phase, but the basic gameplay mechanics seem to be working. In essence, you are free to roam the rather small map and do whatever comes to mind, using one of the available vehicles.

The game is played from a first-person point of view, just to help with immersion and make it more manageable. You can move around like in a regular shooter, but there are no bad guys to shoot or aliens to annihilate. Instead, there’s scaffolding and a bulldozer, and you can probably get a few ideas right away about how the two objects can interact in an entertaining way.

Besides the bulldozer, there is also an excavator on the site, which can come in handy if you are interested in digging some holes. The game’s physics engine is more than capable to simulate multiple objects interacting with each other in realistic gravity, but don’t expect an awful lot either. In fact, the trenches you dig are a bit modest and not very malleable, but you can at least do it, for now.

Visually, everything is rather low-poly and minimalistic, but that’s enough to render most of the objects in the game. The particle effects visible when you are using the excavator to dig a hole are not very pretty either, and the actual vehicles look pretty blocky as well. The construction you can demolish is quite detailed, on the other hand, and it’s satisfying to see it go down in multiple ways.

Yellow Helmets is definitely on the right track, but there’s a lot of work ahead. It needs more content, smoother gameplay mechanics and maybe better graphics. However, the content should be the primary concern, because the experience gets boring and repetitive rather quickly right now.