This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Summary: Craftopia is a genre spanning action adventure, open-world survival game in which you craft items, potions, machines, building pieces, and other technology harvested or refined from the area in order to progress civilization.
Pros: There are lots of recipes to craft and unlock. Some of them are simple like sword and shield, while others allow for you to create machines to automate your harvesting/crafting at a more efficient scale. You can play solo or with friends through XBOX Play Anywhere service for cross platform gaming. Enemy types/levels depend on what island(s) you unlock and makes for a decent variety.
Cons: Graphically this game resembles a remastered Final Fantasy VII. As a PC and console gamer, it is glaringly obvious that this is a PC port due to the controls feeling unintuitive. Once you get about six hours in, you have basically mastered the ability to gather resources and craft what you need to get to the next tier of recipes/gear. Although there are dungeons that you can discover and explore, the exploration is basically a straight line, break/kill stuff loop to get treasure at the end. The clunky combat makes for a button masher of a game where I found myself spamming the left mouse/right trigger (on XBOX) a lot. Loading in and out of new islands is a bit jarring due to the software/server lag. Picking up items places them in your inventory and at random puts them into your hot bar leading me to select items that I didn’t want to. When building and then setting a piece down, you have to go into a menu, select the item you want to craft, exit the menu, wait for the item to craft, take the item, go into your inventory and select the item, exit your inventory and then place the item then re-equip whatever item you had in your hands again.
Note Worthy Moments: After playing for about seven hours with a friend, I decided to go solo for a while and ended up watching YouTube videos about different automations people have set up and attempted to copy them. My wheat/bread/bioethanol machine works without any additional input from me giving me an essentially endless supply of easy to obtain fuel. I also have a similar set up for batteries. Both automations produce the materials you need to build more automations/higher tech gear. This automation game mechanic could be applied to any number of crafting material farming and gives a factory management element to the game which is unlike anything I’ve ever played before.
First Impressions: I was a little put off starting out because in the character creation screen, you are supposed to select different physical characteristics for your avatar. The last of the choices is to pick one of three races; human, elf, or demon. The human race has a balance of abilities (magic and melee) but there isn’t much else to the description to illustrate what that means in stats. Elves are good with bows and magic, but have a lower health pool and not strong with melee attacks. As you might have guessed, demons are not good with magic but have increased health and melee attack damage.
I find it odd that selecting your race isn’t the first thing when creating your character because the demon and elf have additional cosmetic items like horns and larger ears (respectively) in addition to their stats differences which ultimately led me to change my choices. Once you confirm your character, you are presented with a button. Clicking on the button causes the world to be destroyed and you are transported to a heaven type place where, in typical Japanese fashion, a scantily clad beauty tells you that the world has been blown up and that it’s your fault but that you can redeem yourself in a new world. You are then transported to an island at the end of a pier and begin your game. I liked the list of “missions” provided that act like a tutorial of sorts. It doesn’t hold your hand when teaching you the game but it doesn’t leave you scratching your head either.
Conclusion: As of this writing, Craftopia is currently being sold on Steam for $17.99, and on XBOX/Windows Play Anywhere for $19.99. If you’re new to XBOX GamePass like me, you can pick up the first month for $1 and play Craftopia that way. Just remember that each month after, GamePass reverts to it’s $15 a month subscription price. For a game that is full of content, unique in its mechanics, and huge replay-ability I think this is worth checking out on GamePass but would be leery to purchase standalone. I am a huge fan of the survival/crafting genre having played over 2,000 hours of Ark: Survival Evolved, Valheim, Conan: Exiles, and No Man’s Sky and would recommend this to players who are like minded.
By Jordan Betbeze… Expand
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