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Craft the world game review4/9/2023 ![]() ![]() Unfortunately, it doesn’t have much of a story, and the only objective is to survive long enough to craft a portal that will take you to a differently themed world… where you start over with a new base and must craft the portal again. In fact, my greatest threat came from timed monster waves on the surface, which can largely be dealt with by building defensive towers and other traps.Īlongside the sandbox mode, Craft the World comes with a campaign of sorts. What I found was a few moderately difficult boss enemies and some rare ores, but nothing as dramatic or game-changing as I was hoping. The moment when you’ve dug too greedily and too deep, and something emerges to punish your hubris. With the amount of crafting I had to do, and the complexity of some of the larger recipes, this quickly had me yanking at my own beard in irritation.Īs my dwarves descended into the earth, I was filled with anticipation for the climactic moment in any story involving a subterranean kingdom. Every individual piece of every material has to be individually click-dragged. I couldn’t even grab a stack of, say, wood, and place several pieces into the required arrangement. Even if I knew a recipe, I had to individually drag each of the materials to its spot on the grid. Items are crafted on a grid, not unlike in Minecraft, but the method for arranging recipes seems like it was designed for a touch interface. The undead ended up being the least of my concerns, however, as the crafting interface became a much more aggravating nemesis. I settled into a mildly gratifying routine of harvesting during the day, fighting off waves of flimsy skeletons and zombies at night, and occasionally unlocking some new tech to expand or upgrade my burgeoning holdfast. This felt natural and intuitive, as I didn’t have to worry about building anything just for arbitrary “science points.” It’s like leveling up in an Elder Scrolls game-by actually using your skills, instead of assigning ranks after meeting experience thresholds-and I found myself wondering why more strategy games haven’t gone that route. Crafting a certain number of an item tied to a technology I already had (say, Woodworking) would unlock the technology immediately after it (such as better weaponry). The ever-expanding legion of dwarves under my command would pick up tasks I had set in no particular order, and go about their business when they had run out of things to do.Īside from leveling, the main path of progression is through a fairly extensive tech tree. Reaching a new level rewarded me with an extra dwarf and a handful of other rewards in the form of gear, materials, and crafting recipes. ![]() As I harvested, crafted, and built up my meager proto-empire, I gained experience points for my settlement. Concise tutorial pop-ups and a helpful quest journal left me with suggestions of what I should be doing next at any given time, though after a while they began to feel a bit too hand-holdy. The only edifice I could call my own was an immobile stockpile, to which I would bring the various building materials and foodstuffs I harvested from the generally cheerful, cartoonish environment. I began with one plucky dwarf wielding a sharpened rock. The answer, I found after quite a lot of digging, was not much. Though greeted by a charmingly-rendered, Terraria-style side-scrolling world with destructible terrain and open-ended objectives, my most pressing question for this subterranean kingdom-builder was what it could do for me that its predecessors and competitors can’t. Establishing dwarven kingdoms, the primary endeavor before us in Craft the World, has become almost as much a time-honored tradition (or cliche, depending on your preference) in PC gaming as shooting zombies or looting dungeons. ![]()
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