I’ve been in the mood for a survival science fiction game and this one caught my eye. It has most things I'm looking for in a game like this with a lot of the stuff I dislike removed. Planet Crafter for sure stood out of the crowd of games some of which I've already played in this genre.

I’ve lost count of how many times now a survival game like this always has you crash landing, and you need to survive from there. You are some hero and if somehow you can survive long enough you will get saved or do the saving yourself. This is not one of those games.

Not only are you not crash landing. I’m quite certain after exploring the planet and some of the emails I get from the higher-ups. That I'm some kind of criminal who had the bright idea of sighing up to terraform a planet. With how low the chance of the survival rate must have been I can only consider myself quite desperate to take on such a daunting task.

Those three key things right there set The Planet Crafter worlds apart from many other games. It adds quite a fun twist to your situation. It also gave me the player something I did not realize I so wanted to see. The planet I was trapped on slowly changed before my eyes as I slowly advanced from one stage to the next.

Sure, Planet Crafter has a lot of what one might come to expect from a survival game. You start in a tiny little life support pod with a list of tasks to complete. You have things like life, oxygen, and water that you need to maintain.

Do you know what this game does not have? Those annoying parts of survival games that just take all the fun out of them by trying to make them with far too much realism. Even more so when some of those things just add unneeded details that take away from having fun and the visual experience that games should be about.

There were no freezing temperatures during a “night time” that kept me trapped in my starting pod let alone base during the nights. I’ve always hated that part of any survival game. I get to be out and about any time I want. Sometimes it was even raining asteroids on my base!

There are also no wires or pipes or any of that nonsense. I did not have to hook up my energy grid to every single machine I wanted to build. I did not need to haul energy to far-away buildings. If I have a structure producing power anywhere on the planet and my production is exceeding usage everything just works.

Without having these things in a survival game, I got to enjoy more of what I love doing. I got to go out and just explore, build, and loot. Sure, I could run out of food or oxygen and get killed. That happened quite a few times.

The best part is since you are after all terraforming a planet. Your need for oxygen slowly gets solved all on its own. I started off carrying around bottles of oxygen and setting up a bunch of little shelters all over the place to replenish the oxygen bar.

Then like in any survival game, I got to upgrade my equipment to hold more oxygen. Things then got even better when I had a vehicle. Along with other improvements along the way.

Unlike many other games in the survive on a planet theme. My vehicle did not start with already producing oxygen on board. That was something you had to earn. After progressing far enough into the game the module blueprint was unlocked, and I was able to make a rather powerful upgrade to my vehicle.

The best part of it all is the way the map is set up. You are not just clearing out something fully and are done with that area at once. There would be wrecks I'd loot where I'd have to come back with a more powerful tool. There would be caves I'd explore that had ice blocking my path or rocks I had to blow up with explosives.

Each time I'd return to check in an area to see if I could progress further along in it. I got to see the scale of my progression. From all the little places I set up to restore my oxygen that I no longer needed to stop at. Along with just seeing how much faster and the larger amounts of loot I could take out of a place on a single trip.

It was thrilling in a way to see how I was progressing along in Planet Crafter. I did not feel like I was getting upgrades for the sake of upgrades. I got to see the progress of not only having better equipment but the effects my terraforming work was having as well.

This little spot was my starting base. For those who have already played the game you know what the issue is going to be with it. I on the other hand was not expecting what ended up transpiring.

Over time as I increased the oxygen, heat, pressure, and biomass of the planet I was on. Massive changes were happening in the landscape around me. One of them ended up being the formation of lakes.

It also just so happened that I set my base up in a lakebed. It did not take long before realizing something bad was going on. The water levels slowly started to rise. Thankfully it was slow enough that I had more than enough time to relocate.

At first, I thought maybe things were going to be so bad. Just some of the lowest of the lows will fill up with water. It was also perhaps best I was spending more time exploring the map than trying to push how quickly I could terraform the map.

I’d come back from an exploring trip or two and I'd see the changes. At one point I wondered if everything I had set up would still run even if it was underwater. For a while most things like the drills I had set up for creating pressure or the solar power panels for energy kept working.

Over time, however, the water levels increased. Everything stopped working. I started to deconstruct most of the structures I had placed up and down for my materials back. By then I had much more powerful and effective things built. I would always need the basic building elements like iron, titanium, cobalt, and magnesium. Among many other resources.

I did however decide to keep a few things up. For instance, the launch pad remained powered. I used it to send satellites up into space. It was tall enough to keep working even after the lake finished forming around my former base.

Over time like vast parts of this planet things changed in such a dramatic way. One could hardly believe down there at the bottom of that lake still sits my starting base and a couple of the buildings I left there. I’ve also since used the lake to my advantage by growing things in it.

That also makes exploration in this game so much fun. I’d return to one place or another. Sometimes to mine up further resources. Other times to see if some ice melted so I could go deeper into a tunnel. Sometimes I'd just be there to construct a mining rig to get some special crafting resources that I can’t get around my base. I slowly got to see many areas of this game change like the area around my starting base did. That was quite the experience.

I also had loads of fun going into wrecked ships looking for loot. I would often find resources I had yet to find where to farm them or get items that took a little bit of effort to craft.

While there are loads of survival games out there where it feels like all you do is spend all your time inside your base crafting. I can say I spent so much of my time outside exploring. The map just feels perfect. From how it flows from one area into another. Along with the size of it.

For a large part of the game, you don’t have a map you can use while out and about. After a while, you unlock the ability to have a map on a screen in your base. Then much further along you can pull up that map to see the section you are in while you are out.

I rather liked this approach of slowly allowing the player access to a map. Early on it forced me to learn my way around and use landmarks to not get lost. Later, I got to see exactly where key resources are and find more efficient routes to get to a location.

There was still the classic issue I always end up facing in any survival and craft type of game. I’d end up having to expand my storage beyond reason. It got so bad at one point I gave up trying to sort things and just made lots of “overflow” storage containers.

At the very least with the storage locker I was using for the bulk of my storage needs. You could label it. There is also an auto crafter machine I ended up unlocking that you could set up to pull from any storage in range and craft from a pre-selected number of items. Having both a way to label things and some automated crafting at least helped a lot as I got closer to the end game and things got even worse.

Final Thoughts

As I slowly progressed along in this game I'd start to earn different achievements. One thing that started to shock me was just how many that have played the game progressed quite deep into it. That to me is quite the sign of an amazing game. This game keeps things fun and engaging in a way that you just want to keep progressing along it.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Planet Crafter.

Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.