The Planet Crafter

Pretty chill game, easy to spend a while cruising around looting and exploring. I'd love to see the lore expanded, new locations added or expanded upon, more build options and such. But as is, it's been fun.

gutes spiel

To save your time, because I am charitable and nice, I will tell you objectively about this game. Then I will follow it up with my (less important) personal opinion. The part I'll emphasize in advance is that I only recommend it on sale, at $10. The (objective) good: Planet Crafter has a decently sized world with visible progression and a steady increment of mechanics, details and opportunities. Difficulty is reasonable, mostly forgiving, and rarely (if ever) a total detriment or distraction from gameplay. Survival mechanics are also reasonably balanced, the game isn't too pedantic or needy and at certain points it gets easy to neglect your meters in favor of exploration or expansion. The base game's world has a good chunk of missable content that expands on both the in-game universe as well as your opportunities for explosive early growth, cutting out a lot of the early game tedium. The (objective) bad: The in-game universe, even when expanded on, always feels sort of trite. I would compare this to the game Cash Cleaner Simulator, where the in-game story and worldbuilding are good but just unnecessary enough that they end up being a neglected and neglectable aspect of the experience. Certain mechanics have frustration built-in; navigation can be a massive hassle, regardless of what stage the game is in. Building is joylessly interfered with by topography, and the base building modules are rarely all that pleasant to look at or customize. The jank: No two ways around it this game is filled with it. Lots of places to get out-of-bounds, weird controls (will expand on this), lack of polish in a number of places. On controls: number keys 1-4 seem to activate emotes that are equally odd to cancel, none of this is intuitive at first, middle-click enters third person which can be jarring, distracting and obnoxious. Jetpacks are odd and lacking in a certain physical sensation that would make them more fun to use. The vehicles are equally as odd and unsatisfying. At a certain point I surrendered to jetpacking everywhere, not because vehicles are slower or less usable, but because the gameplay and exploration are rarely accommodating for them. There's cosmetic bugs like seams between base modules visually expose outside visual effects without impacting gameplay, hence; just jank, not a big deal and oddly low-visibility circumstances that usually feel inappropriate. Subjectively my opinion is that The Planet Crafter is fine. I got it on sale for $10, and have played none of the DLC as it seems redundant. For that $10 I felt like my time wasn't entirely wasted, nor entirely joyless, but some weird mix of tedium and frustration interspersed with a few moments of wonder or satisfaction. At $10 that's a good experience to me, at $24 I do not have the same opinion and do not believe anyone should pay that amount of money. The DLC (judging by description and my experience with the base game) seems adequately priced. The Planet Craft excels in exploration and atmosphere and absolutely withers when confronted with the need to expand on its actual progression based mechanics. Most progression trees cap out too quickly, most buildings are awkward to place. The things you would like to be more intuitive aren't ever there, but the game includes so much convenience at you that it's rarely worth mentioning until you want to summarize the game as a whole. Again; I only mention it because I think there are too many issues, and too much inconvenience, for a $24 price tag. On sale I think this is an extremely solid purchase and a more respectable iteration in the industrial crafting/survival genre than games like Satisfactory, which bore with as much tedium and no joy in exploration. Where Satisfactory fails, The Planet Crafter succeeds. Where Satisfactory succeeds, The Planet Crafter still succeeds because it does so less vapidly. If you like these types of games and prefer them to others you might genuinely find the $24 price tag to be worth it, in which case do not let my personal appetite for spending convince you otherwise.

i love this game

Gotta do dat terraformin'

Hammer

Fun game