izigame.me

Alright. The Planet Crafter is done and dusted. I saw two of the three endings. Not exactly certain what triggers the third, but I was ready to be finished after sixty hours anyway, so I'll probably just watch the third on YT. I spent $16.79 on this during the recent Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest, and that was a stellar price for this amount of content. I did play this solo, and it's definitely perfectly suited to solo play. However, I would imagine having a crew playing this together would expedite things, especially in the later terraforming stages where the game can drag on a bit.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3267702822
So, you play as a person convicted of a crime that isn't specified, but the implication is that Sentinel Corp, the human corporate government, is not averse to inflating minor crimes into death sentences and then convincing the convicts to accept the almost certain death sentence of terraforming a lifeless planet in exchange for commuting the sentences afterwards. And that is the position you find yourself in. You are dropped onto a lifeless planet with only your trusty multitool gun thingy (the name of which escapes me lol) and a will to survive. Initially, survival will be very difficult since you will have to find food, water, and oxygen wherever you can, and it can be a desperate struggle. As you progress, and especially once you reach certain stages of terraforming, these things stop being a factor.
After exploring a bit and starting to create livable circumstances for yourself, you will really focus on both terraforming and long range exploration, becoming more familiar with the planet even as the planet becomes more livable. This can be pretty exciting at times. The actual act of mining and finding supplies, building your base, and so on, isn't much to write home about, but exploring your first wrecks, finding logs left by other people who had the misfortune of crashing here (or being sent here as a criminal just like you), watching the actual stages of terraforming coming to fruition....those are all pretty inspiring moments that carry a sense of pride and satisfaction. Finding evidence of previous intelligent life on the planet is about as cool as it gets and sets the foundation for the second main plot line, which was kind of awesome. The first being your endeavor to terraform this planet and GTFO of course. One of the things you find talks about how humans evolve in similar fashion under similar conditions regardless of how far apart they are, and the only significant difference at that point is how they think and process information. Which is something I have long considered to be true.
Eventually, you will unlock teleporters, and that basically changes everything. You can easily set up mining operations in key areas, set up teleporters in other areas you deem important, and it really keeps you from having to continue with the super long treks that are part and parcel with this game.
Graphically, what begins as a drab and mostly featureless experience morphs into something completely different as the world starts to change and become more alive. The use of contrast and a full color palette to differentiate between biomes and the circumstances within said biomes was nicely done. There was one area I called "The Moon" in my playthrough that was so visually striking that I just sat there taking it in for minute. The plant life was all really imaginative and the designs really enhanced the world. Additionally, there are some secret areas in the game that are flat out stunning and super cool looking. The planet provides an interesting dichotomy between what begins as basically lifeless desert and transforms into lakes, forests and jungles, and even an ocean.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3268789616
The audio is all activity driven with a musical score in the background that was pretty much ripped straight from Mass Effect. It's nice and all, but not particularly noteworthy outside of some suspect borrowing of the Mass Effect series trademark soundtrack, with some minor tweaks. It's not one for one, but anyone who has played both will find the inspiration undeniable.
What I did not particularly enjoy was exploring the higher difficulty ships. Difficulty in this instance directly correlates to how mazelike a ship is. However, if you've seen one ship, you've seen them all, the rewards aren't super compelling despite finding necessary crafting stuff, flares are kind of costly to craft and use as markers, and I just didn't really enjoy this much at all after like the third or fourth ship. Even when you unlock portals that allow you to find new ships and select which ships you'd like to try to find knowing their difficulty ahead of time, this didn't alter anything other than enhancing the value of the things you can find exploring said ships.
And there are definitely some bugs in this game. Most noteworthy is how you can and will end up inside of mountains and such because the game couldn't render the assets faster than you could arrive at them. Once, this resulted in my finding a secret area but also being trapped in it since I had entered through what looked like more mountain but after it rendered in, was actually a gap in the floor/ceiling (depending on which way you look at it from), rather than from unlocking a door as intended. Rendering speed seems to be the culprit for pretty much all the bugs I personally encountered with two exceptions. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine and then suddenly it's not. Another issue I encountered was some stuttering and moments where the game would just flat out freeze. And finally, every so often, some crafting material would get stuck in the ground or a wall and would be impervious to my efforts to claim it.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3267702805
I tried this with both the Steam Deck and an Xbox X controller and didn't really like how the game played using either. I switched to k/m and it became a pretty seamless experience from a gameplay perspective from that point on.
I think the game was a lot of fun and I enjoyed my stay for the most part. It did perhaps run about five hours longer than I would have liked, and I found myself idling through a lot of the final stage, just checking in to feed and water my character periodically. I'd had my fill of exploration and builder tasks by then. But the sense of awe when finding alien ruins and secret areas, and the feeling of satisfaction and of just flat-out pride when you see the effects of your efforts throughout the world really override any issues I had with the game. It's capable of bringing out all your favorite emotions, and for that, I am thankful to have had the opportunity to play this game. The price is certainly more than fair for the amount of content, and I think if you play this with friends, it could only enhance that experience further. Give it a look for sure.
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