Hello there future cavemen, WoodReviewer here, today I am taking a quick look at 4TRESS by BuildIntoGames Games. To be clear, much like me Meadows Ranch review, 4TRESS is an early Alpha game, which means it is not done yet. That means that what I am reviewing may be changed, possibly even has in the 36 hours since I took my screenshots for the review, and is not final. Also like Meadows Ranch, this means I have the opportunity to help improve the game as it grows, or reuse a bunch of screenshots from this review in its post-release review.

However, 4TRESS is in a much earlier state than Meadows Ranch, more like a glorified tech demo than a game at this point, so I wasn’t planning on doing a review. However, after my review of Giant Survival!, BuildIntoGames insisted that I review another one of his games, so I felt obliged to.

Intro aside, welcome to 4TRESS. It is a zombie survival/crafting game, only without the zombies.

The main point of the game is to gather resources and upgrade weapons while fending off other survivors. Or cavemen. The game has some abandoned buildings, but no hint as to what happened. So I’m assuming future cavemen. Anyway, I skipped all that stuff because a dev server was up that was similar to the regular servers but with unlimited resources and no one playing, so I was free to build this.

Welcome to Casa de Free Stuff. It is made from free stuff, mainly wood-related building materials. Lets take a look inside.

The first issue here is the door. For starters, the sides of the door frame with wood planks are terrible; the wood grain should go vertical. Next is the lighter wooden panels in the door, and the vertical darker parts of the door. Both of those have bad wood grain that should be fixed. While I understand this was probably done to cut down on blocks with unions, a proper wood would only have taken 4 unions compared to the two unions used.

While not the exact same dimensions, this door is a good example that it can be done.

However, inside is an issue with unions that can’t be fixed. Look at this wall. See the diagonal supports? So did I.

It appears that the two diagonal bricks were unioned together, with a third brick added somewhere to get the selection area to be a square. Unfortunately, the two supports have wood grain going in different directions so there is no way to union them properly and have good wood grain.

Speaking of unions, this window has the same issue; bad diagonal supports, and the vertical piece of wood in the window frame has improper wood grain due to unions.

Speaking of the windows, they have one other issue. Look at these poles.

They are sort of combined, but the one on the right is for the window, left is for the door. The vertical pole support for the window had bad wood grain, while the supports for all of the other parts, walls, floors, doors, ect., were just fine. That seems like a mistake rather than an error.

Speaking of cylinders, however, there were several issues with non-supporting cylinders. Look at this hammer, for example.

On the top the wood grain is going front to back, but on the side it is going up and down. Assuming it is one piece of wood, and the brown is bark, that is impossible. There is a similar issue on several other pieces of wood that have bark. As most of you know, I am indifferent if bark goes horizontal or vertical on trees. However, I demand it be consistent, so all the bark goes vertical with the tree or wraps around it horizontally. This issue also occurs on the spear.

So, what causes it? Simple; BuildIntoGames selected one of the angled bricks for the spike before he selected the original cylinder, changing the orientation of the bark on the stick. All he would have to do to fix it is separate the unions and select the wooden pole first when unioning the angled ends and the wood grain will properly wrap around the stick. This will work on the stick, the hammer, and this torch with the same issue to a lesser extant.

So, overall how was the game? Ok. It had some wood grain in the wooden flooring, most of the cylinder support beams were correct, and it had a ladder that was fine. But it still has a long way to go. And by long way I mean about half an hour of building assuming the unions on the hammer and spikes aren’t corrupted. Still, for an alpha, it is atleast better than the finished template places ROBLOX has.