I’ve been messing about with Crashlands.
After Don’t Starve, it feels awfully easy. No ongoing demands, fast-travel pads everywhere, and mild penalties for death. You drop some of the resources you’re carrying, but don’t lose gear, and you can pick up what you dropped easily enough most of the time.
It’s very driven by crafting, which is good, but there doesn’t seem to be any incentive at all to build an interesting base, which is bad. You can build walls and doors, but there’s no reason to do so other than aesthetics, since the mobs in your starting area are never going to bother you. Waaay too much of the crafting is purely decorative, with no game function at all.
I think the “make a base for decorative reasons” works a lot better in a 3D game like Minecraft. I’ve seen a couple of houses that come with the NPCs, and they’re really not much to look at. I think the short-and-squat aesthetic of the wall pieces has something to do with that, they just feel like another piece of the map with some obstacles rather than houses.
It does feel like it’s trying to be Terraria - certainly there’s far more game here than vanilla Minecraft - but not really succeeding. Jurple said it was more like an ARPG than a Terraria-like, but the framework feels similar to me. Yes, you do quests, but to upgrade your gear you gather resources and craft better gear, which is how it was in Terraria. Upgrading your gear is your primary motivator in both games, though Terraria gave you some solid reasons to build a decent base.
I’m not liking the resource gathering too much, mainly because of the number of items that seem to be randomly scattered. It feels really off to me that dirt for a farm is a moderately rare resource that I only see sporadically. Searching at random hoping to find a particular resource, like stone, feels a bit tedious.
I do kind of appreciate the combat system, where all the monsters telegraph their moves. This gives you a strong incentive to move around constantly instead of simply stand there trading blows, and with some of the enemies you have to move to where they will be, since you can’t chase them down otherwise. It rather breaks down if you’re facing a lot of enemies at once, which happens periodically, particularly in scripted battles.
The game tries waaay too hard to be funny. Everything single thing is a joke, every line of dialog and every item description. None of it is as witty as, say, the furniture descriptions in The Sims. None of it has brought a smile to my face, mostly I guess because none of it feels actually clever.
In short, it’s kind of mediocre overall, but I guess I’ll stick with it for now.
