izigame.me

Playing the 1.0 update of Planet Crafter has been fun so far— now that I'm approaching the end and progression feels fairly repetitive and drawn out, I feel like I've formulated my thoughts enough to share them in a review.

Planet Crafter is a game with big ideas! You're taking an entire map that's so barren and orange/red it hurt my eyes at times, and turning it into something lush and honestly pretty striking at times! It's very fun and rewarding to watch the map transform. The gameplay(and indeed, much of the game design itself) borrows from Subnautica; you explore, you gather resources, you build your base, you make the world your own. Instead of finding the unique flora and fauna like in Subnautica, you get to put it there yourself!

Many of my issues with this game, and why I will not be finishing it despite being a stone's throw away from the finish line and ending, stem from technical issues and an apparent lack of polish that I originally thought was attributed to the early-access state of the game. Now that we're at a full release, I feel that the game is far too unstable. Hitches, freezes, and an apparent memory leak that caused my entire computer to lock up on multiple occasions made playing the game more stressful than rewarding or fun, because I was always worried about saving as early and often as possible to protect my progress(which is largely just based on waiting real-world time for your terrformation values to tick up) from the inevitable crashes.

The map is full of holes. I found a gap in the geometry within a 15-second walk from the spawn point that allowed me to clip under the rocks. The game evidently makes a lot of concessions to maintain performance; one of these concessions is very aggressive LOD and occlusion culling of basically everything. Map geometry, player-placed buildings, even the plants that you grow will very obviously pop in and out of existence as you are moving to and fro. The lay of the land is hard to get a grasp on because of how drastically the environment changes as you travel; something I thought was just a bare hill that would allow me to access another part of the map is actually blocked by a huge cliff that simply popped into existence when I got close enough. It's jarring, confusing, and immersion-breaking. Another comparison to Subnautica is hardly fair here; those guys had the advantage of an ever-present underwater fog to hide what they were doing in the distance, but they also had the environments and objects fade in and out rather than simply appearing and disappearing. I don't want to make assumptions, but it feels very much like higher-quality assets and systems were added onto the very shaky foundation built by the team working on this game when they were much more amateur as developers. One example of this I feel is the lack of a proper day-night cycle. The skybox is eternally static, and "night" is signified by the game cranking down the exposure without changing how anything is lit. It's strange and doesn't feel like something that should have passed any kind of a quality check for the 1.0 release, which is a statement that I unfortunately feels like applies to many things about this game.

I hope that some day I can return to this game and properly finish it without the pains of the current version. If you love survival-craft games, this is probably still worth a try. If you love having a smooth and well-polished experience, this game is not for you.