izigame.me

Raft is a survival crafting game and, like so many in the genre, has a fun early game, stumbles in the midgame, and falls flat by the end.
Raft's central premise is that you are a person stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean, and the early game sells this perfectly. There's nothing around you but blue sea and the garbage floating in it. You have nothing to help you except for a hook made of trash and the four pontoons you're standing on. And you have the constant threat of death, both from lack of food and water, and from the ever-present shark circling below your raft.
So you start hooking garbage. You learn how to make things. You protect and expand your raft, you fix damage, you navigate, you learn to survive. You have fun, in short. Eventually you bump into islands, find new components and crafting materials, and the complexity of what you can make expands. Soon you can sail to the islands you choose to, and that's when you enter the midgame.
The midgame of Raft consists of travelling between story islands (rather than randomly encountered ones), exploring them, and collecting the tier 2 materials and recipes found there. This is where the cracks start to show, both in story and gameplay. The setting - that the entire world is flooded to the point where only a few skyscrapers and islands show above the water - is already ridiculous, and the characters and behaviors that exist within that setting are, frankly, silly, but we'll get to that in the endgame.
It's the gameplay that begins to be a problem. In almost all survival crafting games there is a rule: as complexity increases so to does automation. This means that, as it takes more complex and rare items and materials to craft the next thing, the previously made things become easier to make, often via automation. This stops the player from feeling overwhelmed; it's very easy to lose track of what you need to be collecting and when, especially when equipment degrades with use, so automating low-tier items helps prevent that.
Raft has zero automation, and everything you equip degrades constantly. This is exhausting. You can set up automatic collection of tier 1 materials, but no there is no automatic crafting to replace broken equipment, and neither tier 2 or 3 materials can be collected any way but manually. Moving into the endgame and tier 3 recipes and materials is where this issue really shows.
Tier 3 ore can only be found with a metal detector. Islands have either 1 or 2-3 metal detector areas within them. You only have a 50% chance of even finding an item that can be tier 3 ore with each dig. You need dozens of ore to craft the tier 3 equipment you'll need. Obviously, this takes an absurd amount of time, but the truly painful part is that, while you're searching for it, all your other equipment is actively breaking, meaning you still need to manually collect all the tier 2 materials and manually craft every single thing you need.
It is literally not worth your time to bother.
Thankfully, you don't need tier 3 equipment to finish the game, but sadly the game ends with a wet fart. The climax the story is building to, the culmination of years of development, is a villain who is angry that people turned luxury apartments into living quarters and farms. Yes, you read that right: the final boss of the game takes over the last human settlement and jails everyone because he is mad that luxury apartments are being used to keep humanity alive.
This is, of course, meant to be a commentary one greed and shortsightedness, etc, but it's so pathetically blunt that the message simply doesn't land. Not helping is the fact that this final boss has a northern European accent that is so ridiculous to hear as an english speaker that all his threats just sound hilarious. He literally sounds as if Goldmember from the Austin Powers movies was threatening you with death. That'd be fine in a comedy, but Raft takes its setting seriously.
It's just a really, truly pathetic end to the game.
All told, Raft is very much a mixed bag. It absolutely nails its ridiculous setting, especially in the early game which is very fun, but the mid- and end-game gameplay failures make it a chore to finish, and the story being completely unimpactful doesn't help.
I still recommend it, but not unreservedly.
P.S.: Raft has an active modding community that has worked hard to counteract some of the criticisms in this review. If you do pick up the game, make sure to check out the great work the community is doing.