with due respect to the fact that the game is early access and still receives content updates, you can't really afford any semblance of minimalism with open world survival craft. this genre lives and dies by its sheer breadth and depth of content; see modded Minecraft for the zenith in this regard.

also a game very much in the Terraria subgenre of this genre, a subgenre that is markedly worse than the Minecraft one. combat is generally not what makes this genre interesting, and no amount of soulsbornification will change that, and the sort of half-linearity of Terraria and as thus this game is a blight on a genre that is always at its best when it fulfills its promise of being open-ended. these games are friendly to, borderline require, friends to play with; you may as well design the game around their intrinsic-motivational specialization, not in mere combat but in their trades. modded Minecraft and Don't Starve Together understand this, or at least appear to. you have the miner, the builder, the bookkeeper, the engineer, the thaumaturge, the warrior, etc. that is ultimately the vitality of this genre.

some things i like and would prefer to see in a better open world survival craft game: i like that terrain is still fully destructible even if it is not grid-based, i like that the mechanics incentivize building aesthetically pleasing structures even when players are purely focused on function, i like the atmosphere, i like the art style

previous rating: 3