The best night I had in Brickhold went like this: our tower buckled under the weight of a second turret platform, the collapse severed a power line, the main gate lost power, and three of us held the breach with hammers while the fourth sprinted to reroute a generator. We survived by a single wall segment. It was chaotic, funny, and exactly what this game wants to be. Unfortunately, it was also the exception.
Building with consequences
Forgeworks Collective’s base builder is at its best when its systems collide. Every block has weight, and towers built without proper supports will crack and eventually fall. Power flows from generators through wiring you lay by hand, so a gate or turret is only as reliable as the line feeding it. These rules turn building into problem-solving, and planning a fortress with friends on a shared blueprint table is genuinely engaging.
Automation arrives in the midgame, with conveyor lines and turret networks that let experienced crews build something impressive. Getting there, though, takes far too long. The first eight or so hours involve a lot of hand-gathering and refining, and progression is gated behind resource totals that feel tuned for a live service rather than a premium game. Each world also has a handful of biomes with their own materials, and the best stretches of the game come from expeditions to fetch something you need for a new wall type. Those trips are short and pleasant, but they rarely carry any danger outside of siege nights, so they settle into routine quickly.
The same siege, again
Nightly sieges are the heart of the loop, and their lack of variety is the biggest problem. There are only a handful of clockwork raider types at launch, and once you have seen the siege engine that targets your walls’ weakest point, you have seen most of what the game has to throw at you. By the third in-game week, our group was building the same defensive layout every time, because it simply worked.
The gears turn at dusk. Brick by brick, hold what is yours.
In-game loading screen
Technically, Brickhold is shaky. On PlayStation 5, frame rate held near 60fps in small bases but dipped into the 40s when large automated factories were running during a siege. Crossplay is the bigger issue: across our sessions, a PC or Nintendo Switch 2 player was disconnected roughly once every ninety minutes, and on two occasions the host’s world rolled back several minutes on rejoin. Forgeworks has acknowledged both problems and says fixes are in progress.
Accessibility options are decent, with full button remapping, a hold-to-toggle option for repeated actions, adjustable text size, and a build-mode overlay that highlights load stress in shapes as well as colors. Solo play is supported, but the systems clearly assume a full crew, and building alone means a lot of walking between generators.
If you have a regular group and patience for an early grind, there is fun to be had building a fortress together. For everyone else, Brickhold is worth checking back on after a few patches, when its foundation finally has some walls on it.
