Planet Crafter (2024)

This game started out great for me, very addictive, and the arrival through blue sky stage is extremely satisfying. The trouble is that this is actually an incremental game wrapped in a survival crafting/base building game, and I'm not big on incremental games. Past the halfway point, it becomes entirely about slapping a few of whatever the newest machine is around at random and then launching more rockets for multipliers. Being able to fully clear out wrecks is fulfilling, but not interesting enough to be what I would call fun. For me, this was not a case of "game more fun when number go up."

Once you've done rockets and machines, there's really nothing else to do except wait for the next target number to be hit, and that's not good. There's nothing motivating me to do anything further; I redesigned my base five days in a row, and wandered around getting stuff I don't really need from golden chests and portal wrecks. The animals stage was really a bummer, too. If there were actually a reason to give animals different traits and colors (like if you have a shelter in a cave, animals spawned there might require bioluminescence), and if you had to, say, have particular plants growing from spawners before animals would move in, it would be far more engaging. If the animals reproduced on their own, and you had to add more plants or some kind of predator to keep them in check, that would also be great. Instead the assortment you plug into a shelter just sort of wander around and make noises.

I got partway through the first moon/planet you can go to after Prime, and that was even less engaging, just a highly abbreviated version of the original planet, with a less interesting story and also a ginormous planet in the sky that was setting off my megalophobia every time I turned in that direction. The process isn't interesting enough for me to do this twice more, especially when there aren't achievements for anything after Prime. I 100%'d the game's achievements, and that's all I really care about.

Let me be clear: this is not a bad game. Not at all. I just wanted more out of it, more story, a need for more creativity and strategizing on my part, and just generally a game where I can't win by spamming rockets and machines and making the ugliest assortment of devices possible. Survival crafting and base-building games are my favorite, and while the crafting was pretty good, and the survival well-implemented, the base building was far too fiddly (even with mods) to get any real satisfaction out of it. I did enjoy all the posters and animal figures, at least.

Planet Crafter is a 1st person base building survival crafting game. Your player crash lands on a planet with just a few tools and resources, and are told to make your way on this foreign planet. There are no enemies or hostile creatures, so a pretty relaxing experience there compared to most survival crafting games but you do still have oxygen, health, and food meters to worry about.

There's a great sense of progression here, where you will steadily unlock more tools, items, or abilities throughout even just by exploring your world. You can choose (and should) to expedite these unlocks faster by building machines that help in terraforming your new planet. There is a sense of excitement from start to end of when you get that notification that you can now craft a brand new machine or upgrade to your character that never really goes away.

There are multiple biomes on the planet with their own environment that vary greatly. Some are much more hazardous than others, needing to advance a good bit into the game before being able to truly explore. These all keep the game fresh as you try to solve the puzzles of how to explore these areas and slowly uncovering the subtle story here.

There is a story that can be found via messages you receive from your home base, as well as computer logs found all over the planet. It's nothing too crazy or exciting, but given most of these games typically just ask you to survive, it's a fun little distraction.

I really only have two complaints about this game, both being relatively minor. The first is the difficulty, or lack thereof. Apart from the one or two times I got absolutely lost and died due to running out of oxygen or water, the game is really safe and easy. I'm glad there were no hostile enemies as this was my fun turn the brain off game, but at the same time the stakes should have been maybe a little higher somehow. My other complaint being the grind towards the end of the game. Unlocks come pretty quick and easy for the first 50 hours of my game, the next 10 slowing down quite a bit, then at that point slow to an absolute crawl. That last small percentage of upgrades needing to finish the game gets pretty insane. After realizing how much longer it would take just to finish the last bit, I installed the mod that gives access to the dev console for the game just so I wouldn't have to significantly increase play time for such a small payoff.

All in all, this was a really fun, addicting, and relaxing open world survival crafting game that I highly recommend. The devs for this game just recently released a DLC, giving access to a whole new planet to explore, and have been pretty consistent with patches and updates to the game!

Why is a dumbed down version of Subnautica, with no enemy combat, with assets that are what you expect of an indie game developed by 2 people and an incredibly basic gameplay loop so popular on Steam?

If you're looking for an objective answer, you won't find it here, but I can give you some elements that maybe can convince you if this game is for you or not.

So Planet crafter is simple, cheap and straightforward. You get O², pressure and heat meters that you need to increase to terraform a barren planet that is filled with some resources that you gather to progress. You're sent here as a prisoner and as you work toward your goal, the corporate overlords provide you with better blueprints. The ONLY way to die is to deplete your O² bar (goes down fast), your H²O bar (goes down at normal speed) or your food bar (goes down slowly) or if you fall. And that's it, that's the game. As you explore further and further away from the initial base you discover some landmarks, some areas start to open, and you get new gear that helps you progress, and you start again.

Why is it so good ?

• Multiplayer : this can be played with up to 10 players and the crafting freedom, the allocation of roles (explorer, engineer, botanist) can be incredibly pleasing if you're in the mood for it.

• Stress-free : I couldn't pass the first few hours of Subnautica because of a latent thalassophobia and a steep learning curve. Here, you will progress toward your goals either very slowly or very fast, but there's virtually no punishment if you miss a specific spot or even if you die because of lack of preparation. The map itself is not super wide, so you don't have to spend dozens of hours to get the gist of it.

• Atmosphere : I'm a sucker for Sci-fi and this is a very well done crafting simulator in space, even if graphics are definitely not impressive.

• Overall pace : This is probably the biggest win for this game. The upgrades feel incredibly rewarding and are all pretty meaningful. You get new stuff every 20 min approximately, and it slowly shapes your base, your surrounding and it just hits rights (lizard brain goes brrrrrr). At some points you get new tech or milestones that will really change the way you play, and that happens a few times throughout the game. I don't want to spoil anything but experiencing them with a bunch of mates makes for really cool moments.

Overall it's not a perfect game but probably one of the nicest surprise I had the chance of playing this year. I can only hope the team will take home this massive W and come back with another banger when they are ready.

I turned down the food, water and oxygen depletion rates because they just seemed tacked on for artifical difficulty.

I had a fun time with the game, the progression is good, seeing the numbers go up is nice, and by far the best part was seeing the planet change.

It remains, however, a lesser version of subnautica and it gets very grindy towards the end, so I'll just watch the multiple endings on youtube.