Core Keeper Review (katie)
The endgame feels like a slog—boring and ultimately pointless. I enjoyed the game quite a bit until I hit my first major irritation: finding scarab wing covers. I stumbled into the boss chamber before I even collected 40 of them. Why 40? It feels like just a waste of time.
According to the achievements, only 3.8% of players have defeated Druidra. I have, and after the fight, I lost all motivation to continue. The battle was dull; I wasn’t in any real danger of dying as long as I had room to maneuver. It primarily involved creating space and then standing almost off-screen to shoot the creature. Honestly, that sucks. I’d prefer to deal more damage and end the fight sooner but if you kill yourself, you waste the lousy jungle emerald it took you forever to find in the first place which is also, disappointingly, the reason you are killing the boss to begin with. It just feels bad to use an item to farm one copy of the item and then have to wait on a respawn timer to get your next lousy one copy to upgrade your green "pandabear" armor which has almost no stats whatsoever other than a big melee damage buff from not getting hit. Boring loadout for the best craftable armor...
I can see the game's “end”—there comes a point where you can reveal all the boss locations, leaving little mystery left. The passage feels like a vast, empty biome, though perhaps I find it too boring and tedious to explore its full potential. After 100 hours of gameplay, I still haven’t located the arena in the wilderness. Farming gems to upgrade items is monotonous and highly limited; the best method is to use one to kill a titan for another. You obtain them one at a time by defeating easy but high-health bosses. Boring.
There are other aspects that make no sense to me:
Why does the shovel upgrade stop at galaxite?
Why does the sledgehammer level also stop at galaxite? Why does a fully upgraded iron sledgehammer have more mining damage than a fully upgraded scarlet or galaxite sledgehammer?
Why are there no sprinkler upgrades? There could have been sprinklers for galaxite and solarite at least.
Why are there so many food combinations? There is an absolutely insane amount of food available. It's a very "noisy" segment of the game compared to other aspects.
Why are there so many useless items? I decided to collect all the armor sets on mannequins because i was getting hundreds of copies of useless equipment i never wore even once. I must've salvaged the corrupt warden set a thousand times over. Honestly, make enemies other than bosses stop dropping armor. I'm tired of throwing it away.
Why are these items even called "Valuables"? They are annoying—my inventory is often filled with random "valuables" that are worth virtually nothing. They become a frustrating burden that requires frequent trashing or trips back to base to sell. This is especially true when I end up with more metal bars than I can use, which can be sold for thousands of currency.
Frankly, some of the talents are just silly, particularly those that say "get more food from eating." Food is so easy to produce that these talents are essentially worthless.
Why are there only two drill levels? Why are scarlet drills adequate for solarite and whatever the green mineral from the passage is called?
It’s surprising how much I enjoyed this game up until the titan phase when everything fell apart. The world's generational algorithm became intuitively obvious, rendering much of the detail meaningless. The pointlessness and repetitiveness of the "scenes"—oh look, it's another giant dead bug and yet another chest full of potions I won't use and "valuables" I can discard—became tiresome.
What the game needed more than anything was NPCs—people would have made the scenes more interesting. Instead, it's merely background clutter to be razed, harvested and thrown away.
I would prefer to give this an overall neutral review because I more than got my money's worth, but in the end, I’m left feeling unsatisfied. And don’t fool yourself into thinking there are mods that will enhance your experience; the mods available for this game are just basic quality-of-life fixes.