Walkthroughs

How to make the best car in Hovercraft: Takedown - 10 top tips and cheats

Highway to hell

How to make the best car in Hovercraft: Takedown - 10 top tips and cheats
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How to play

This new game is a simple auto-runner with a difference.

After a few runs playing the game - which sees you speeding along a busy desert highway, blasting away at rival cars and darting in and out of traffic - you'll realise that you can build your own vehicle.

This is the real meat of the game: using a simple Minecraft-like building mode you'll get to snap together blocks to make a personalised hovercraft. You can then take it onto the road and see how well it does.

Building the best car

And that's what this guide is going to focus on: how to build a great craft that will stay right-side up, and get you loads of points.

Look at the arrow

Hovercraft

The arrow on the bottom of the floor of the garage shows the direction that your car will be travelling in. So use this to make sure your vehicle is going to head in the right direction.

Maintain balance

A good car is well balanced. If you have one weird wing off to the side, or a giant nose poking out, the car is going to fall down, scrap along the rode, and erode into a billion pieces.

Either stick with something balanced, like a classic car design, or use thrusters to keep noses and wings aloft with the rest of the car.

Consider damage control

If you make a vehicle with wings, will it still stay upright when those wings are snapped off by two passing trucks? Getting beat up is a fact of life in Hovercraft: Takedown, so you should plan for that eventuality.

Think about backup thrusters and failsafe design. Make sure your car can still go even when it has been scraped, smashed, and shrunk down.

Protect your best bits

The most important thing to do, though, is to make sure your weapons, thrusters, and power core are all safe and sound.

They can work even when surrounded by blocks, so use basic blocks to create protective buffer zones around your critical components. That way they'll be safe, even after an impact.

Use a standard car as a base

Takedown

You don't need to build a car from scratch if you don't want to. It might be easier to simply build upon, and modify an existing car. To do this, go into the garage, find a car you have unlocked, and hit the spanner icon next to the name.

You can't save over the top of the default cars, so hitting "save" will copy your creation to a new slot.

Use as many blocks as possible

You might fancy making a car that's lean and mean - but that's just a ticket to deadsville. Slim cars can sneak through gaps in the traffic, sure, but they'll also shatter into pieces and reveal their sweet, juicy power core at the slightest bump.

Instead, try to use 300 to 400 blocks to make something a bit beefier.

Wait a few seconds

Okay, so you've made your car and you're ready to take on the world. But hold on.

If you go to the main screen with a new vehicle selected and wait, you'll get to see the vehicle bob about and see how well it balances, if it's tipping to one side, or - in my case - if it immediately falls over and smashes into a thousand blocks. Whoops.

Pick your weapon types wisely

Takedown

A tracking machine gun sounds good, and it is - you can attack enemies even when you're not directly behind them. But these guns also pick targets for you, and will sometimes aim at harmless trucks when a baddy is shooting right at you.

So mix and match different guns to give you the advantage in every situation.

Save your upgrade points

You might be tempted to spaff all your upgrade points on the basic Police Roadster, but keep them for now. Once they're spent, you can't get them back. They're better spent on later vehicles or, better still, your own custom cars.

Get some free cash

Takedown

Click on the thumb icon on the main screen. From here you can get coins for liking the game on Facebook, following the developer on Twitter, and subscribing to the developer's YouTube channel.

Turns out that you get the coins as soon as you hit the button, regardless of whether or not you follow through with your follow or subscription.

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer