Recent reviews by 🐢 FerrMuker 🐢

The game feels like it has potential at the moment, but definitely still needs some work.

Personally, I enjoy casual farming sims, but don't really play many games that have an anime look so I was a little unsure how much I would like the game, thinking it might heavily lean into anime tropes. However, there seemed to be more focus on yokai in general which was a nice surprise.

The demo is very short, 3 days, in which you barely have time to start exploring, or if you get unlucky, complete some of the initial quests. I think my main two gripes at the moment are the combat (it's slightly jarring at the moment), and the loading screens that repeatedly take me out of the moment. Hopefully they can remove most of the loading screens all together as currently, while being on a high end machine on installed on an SSD, I still hit a loading screen leaving or entering buildings, or when certain events trigger.

Gameplay is fun, can make you feel pretty smart at times
Story is enjoyable, has witty dialogue and interesting characters
In my opinion, well worth the money


I played the game on default difficulty, didn't skip the story and I've 100% the achievements because I really enjoyed playing the game.

The game encourages experimentation. I think one thing I'd probably like to stress about the game is that it's very flexible to how you want to play.
- Dialogue is entirely skippable, if you're not into stories or don't like certain parts, including entire sections of the game blend gameplay and story are entirely skippable as both sections or levels, if you don't want to do them. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, dialogue and levels so I never felt like I needed to.
- You can play on super easy mode, default mode, try out the optional tasks for additional challenges or even make it much more challenging at any point
- Not doing optional tasks isn't punishing, you're rewarded for doing them, but you can complete the game without doing them. You unlock outfits with the confidence points you get from them (I did enjoy the reasoning behind it) but even then, the most expensive outfit only required 20, and you end up having more than enough to buy every outfit before the end of the game.
- As mentioned before, you're given unlimited chance each round to experiment, you aren't forced to do so though if you don't like that, don't use it

In short, if you want a casual game that you can just enjoy the story of, or a challenging game that makes you feel smarter for figuring out solutions, or anything in-between, you can pretty much tune the options/gameplay to what you want.

Characters all feel pretty different, both in gameplay and personality. I saw someone complain about "marvel-like dialogue" and while there might be a little of that, I found the dialogue to be a little wittier than that most of the time. Characters and the story are built up with gameplay elements in a way I thoroughly enjoyed. Dialogue didn't feel too long and are often a nice comic relief break between levels. I can't decide if the story was too short or it was the right length as it didn't feel too short, but I wanted to play more. Fortunately there's also a level editor and user made levels.

A few extra notes:
- There's XP in the game but it's kinda fake, you get to max level for each character at the end of the game, and you can't get every skill point, but you can respec (although I never did).
- There are a few character combinations that allow for what you could describe as broken combos (at least on default), these are usually combinations assisted by the skill tree but the game shuffles your team for many rounds so whether or not you can utilise these is usually map specific.
- There's a few upgrades that I feel aren't worth it just by reading them, while others seem like ones you'd absolutely want. I think this is common with many games with trees as it's pretty difficult to make a completely balanced set of upgrades, but I did find it to be something that was a little easier to figure out at a glance

Summary: I enjoyed the game, it's fairly relaxing although there's a few QoL improvements that could be made, as well as potentially some balancing. At time of writing this, there is a little bit of an amateurish feel in regards to certain aspects of the game, which could either be considered part of the charm, although some might not like it.

Planet Crafter is an enjoyable and, on standard, there's no real pressure to achieve certain milestones. The game focuses more on exploring than full base building from my experience. The general game loop seemed to be: explore/gather resources, potentially unlock something useful, return, add a couple of buildings then rinse and repeat. So breaking down this game loop:


Pros:
- Basically every direction from where I landed had something to explore or catch my eye
- Without spoiling anything, there starts to be a bit of intrigue in regards to things you find on the planet
- Exploring often helps gather more complex items that you could create, but are often easier to find in new areas, encouraging you to do so

Cons:
- Travelling around and gathering stuff can get a little frustrating at times, it takes a long time to get to certain destinations and even if you make a small stop point or second base, you eventually need to ferry your items to your main base anyway. I understand that it helps fill the time while the machines at your base terraform but towards the mid-late game it was getting a little frustrating even with the best backpack, jetpack and exoskeleton for that part of the game.
- Certain areas felt a little rough to explore due to a certain messiness with how some of the areas seemed to be put together, a few areas felt particularly unpolished


Pros:
- You can start building your base within 5 minutes of starting the game with minimal instructions
- Destroying and creating buildings return and use the same amount of materials, meaning you can easily undo a mistake without losing anything, or even upgrade and get all the materials back
- Power is distributed over the entire planet, so you don't have to worry about wiring things together which simplifies things greatly

Cons:
- For a good portion of the game, I seemed to need so many of the largest storage available to me at the time. It did eventually become clear that I'm supposed to destroy some items (more on that later. This meant that I spent a lot of time expanding my base and trying to build more storage to handle all the items I had to store for later parts
- Building can feel a little janky. There's this "extend" or "link" option that is helpful for expanding a base while inside but you can't actually see what orientation it's at for parts that care about that, or how it sits in the world making the feature a little annoying to use at times.
- The deconstructor sometimes highlights the wrong thing, fortunately it can't deconstruct things with things in it but I've almost deconstructed a living quarter when trying to remove a thing inside it a couple of times


Pros:
- The world changes as you terraform it which gives you a good sense of progression. It also means you gain access to new areas to explore as well as a few shortcuts between areas, meaning that the terraforming aspect of the game feeds into the exploration and vice versa
- The game provides you with hints as the game goes on, some a little more subtle than others (such as it's a good idea to build your base at higher altitude) which means if you don't figure something out eventually then it'll let you know a little clearer but if you have figured it out, you pretty proud of yourself.
- Unlocking drones later on in the game feels like a major turning point and progression felt very fast after that point, I also felt more free to build up my base and less like I had to go out and pick stuff off the ground.

Neutral:
- Balancing on standard at least seems to lean a little more heavily towards casual as very little things you do aren't undoable, the recycle machine is great but it does feel a little odd being able to recycle water into ice, or a tree into a plant and some mutagens.

Cons:
- This isn't a huge con but progress feels like it comes in bursts, there are some periods in the game where I feel like I am just waiting to hit the next milestone. This might be because I was playing the game wrong but I was using similar strategies for all the resources and some felt like they were zooming ahead while others felt like they were lagging behind in progression
- The game has very few buttons to press, which is fine, but it does mean that certain buttons are doing quite a bit, namely left click. Left click is use (in world), pickup/mine, construct, deconstruct (based on tool). This resulted in a few cases where I accidentally deconstructed something I wanted to use because the tool was wrong, or constructing something when I wanted to use some stairs.
- It's not 100% obvious (perhaps I missed it) what one of the tools does, it looks like a light but left clicking doesn't do anything as there's a specific toggle light key.
- The graphics are somewhat lacking, as are the animations. Pop-in is common and dramatic. I've got a pretty modern machine and I'd occaisionally have the game pause as it pops in a bunch of assets.
- Certain Physics are wonky or felt like they were unnecessarily added. For example:
- rockets have physics attached to them, meaning that they sometimes fall over or behave weirdly but still function mechanically, just acting as an obstacle. They should just be an animation going up (and down in the case of one).
- You fall faster in some situations if you activate your jetpack, in a very backwards form of logic.
- When meteors land, they produce a bunch of annoying physics objects that you cannot do anything about save for wait for them to despawn so you can either move past them (if they end up inside your base) or grab the items inside them.



Not doing pros and cons here. The UI is relatively minimal but generally felt slightly clunky. All inventories do feature a sort button which is nice to see as many games don't have one. There's 2 pages of progression trees and going up and down each section them felt a little clunky and to a certain extent wasteful on space.

Some of the machines have subpar interfaces. A few machines have a screen for recipes and then a screen for actually using the recipes, which felt the most clunky, and seemed to be so that the various interfaces could be reused (as seemed to be the case for one of the screens that even has the wrong machine name.

Several aspects of the UI are locked behind upgrades (map, compass, pinning recipes, hiding old recipes) which I'm not against. Certain parts can also be improved further by finding better blueprints or building rockets.

The map, however, is awful. It looks stretched and distorted and allows you to move out of bounds, peeking behind the curtain a little. You're not marked on the map from what I can tell either, and it is probably the most amateur looking things in the game. So much so that I actually generally avoided using the map.

I know it looks like I've put quite a few more cons than pros, but I am being a nit-picky. It's a game I've thoroughly enjoyed playing even with a few pain-points. I think there are some aspects of the game that could do with a little more love, or attention and some parts of the game do feel half baked, but the core gameplay has been very fun.