Raft Life

In games I’ve played in the past like Ark Survival evolved where you could build a raft it was not the focal point. While I’ve had a lot of funs in a game like Ark and I loved trying to live on a raft. As anyone knows who plays that game you are quite limited by how big you can make that raft and how capable it can even become.

With Raft's main focus on survival from living off the raft, it really comes down to how much time you want to invest in collect and building things out. I build quite a mightily platform that more than suited my needs. With no worries of hitting a building limit cap or anything of that nature just an annoying shark that would try and damage it from time to time. It has been rather a smooth sailing when the seas are not rough.

Building And Crafting

A large component of Raft is building and crafting. You start with very little and almost no space to move around. Along the way you are also dealing with a shark trying to attack the raft and yourself when you jump into the water. With a little bit of waiting and collecting things start to shape up to become a small village if you are willing to put in the time to go that route.

The player needs to unlock crafting recipes and that is done in two major ways. The first being just putting random items you first get into research tables after you have built it and unlocking higher tier items. The second is finding blueprints and putting them into the table to be researched.

There are also several crafted objects for the raft itself you can make along the way. From a simple sail and streamer to take advantage of the wind in the game. Up to building an engine and using an antenna to get locations on a receiver. There is a lot more to it than just drifting along where ever the ocean winds take you.

Almost everything you need in the game needs to be crafted. If you need to make a circuit board for instance you need to go out and gather copper and scrap from below in the ocean. The copper itself needs to be smelt which requires wood for fueling the smelter. Finally, you need to gather plastic floating along the ocean. The circuit board itself is used in several advanced crafting recipes that require several other components as well.

Not everything is gathered from the water’s edge, however. The more advanced stuff you tend to find below around islands where you are endlessly dealing with a shark that stalks you. Requiring say copper tended to be my main driving force behind wanting to seek out an island to go diving off of and check to see if it had any to farm.

The game even has a bit of a cooking system. Where you collect reprices not by crafting but from finding them in chests. There are several different ingredients like potatoes, beets, mango, watermelon, pineapple, coconut, algae, fish, meat, and so on. If you are playing with others someone alone could role-play as the rafts chief!

I felt overall building and crafting was sufficient. It was not overwhelming to the point you needed to personally take notes of a large list of sub crafting to get to a final product. It was also not to a simple where you just go around collecting the same three things that make everything out of them either.

Exploration

Raft does make you feel like you are in some kind of water world. As it is mostly comprised of water and islands for the player to gather and explore on. There are a couple of other things in-game but I don’t want to spoil too much of the game’s storyline which seems to still be in the works with updates once in a while.

While I do wish the average island was a bit bigger. They usually provided three or four minutes of gathering and exploring for any loot chests before I found myself going after the main reason I seek them out for would be around in the more shallow waters.

The islands themselves can contain quite a lot of different trees and even collectible plants. So they are not something you want to skip over either. Most of the time they are not important enough if you skip exploring one you need not worry about missing something. That I rather enjoyed as I was not always in the mood to explore yet another island after my first few dozen.

The downside to being in the water is the shark you are almost always being confronted by. While you can kill it or trick it with bait. It will over time respawn or take notice of you once again and try to hunt you. There are also other creatures in this game. So exploring is not always a peaceful adventure.

Final Thoughts

Other Game Reviews

• Hello Neighbor
• Subnautica
• RimWorld

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from the game Raft.

Discloser: This game is in early access.