Recent reviews by M R W O R L D W I D E

Game is super buggy tbh, can't recommend at all.

Game performs poorly, there's no excuse for not being able to hit 90+fps on a 7900XTX and i9 9900K, both of which at most reach 40-50% utilisation.

Skip if you want any sort of high frame-rate experience.

All negative critique of the game should not be brushed off to the side because 'it's just Bethesda'.

There's a severe lack of information in this game (that I've experienced in 10-15 hours) that shows or even hints to where vendors are, you'd think that the commerical district would be where you'd find most vendors in New Atlantis. Nope. The ones you likely care about are actually in the Residential District!

The game is severely unoptimized, on an RX 7900 XTX and i9 9900K @ 5GHz I cannot maintain a stable 60fps at 1440p high/ultra without upscaling, Cyberpunk runs significantly better than this. The game doesn't even look that good either. It doesn't look terrible but the performance is not in line with the visuals. The game puts detail in all the wrong places, you can zoom in to a hamburger and it'll look really great, but then characters that walk about look like higher resolution Oblivion NPCs. It's just completely bizarre.

Then there's the User Interface/Experience, the menus in general in this game are absolutely atrocious. They were clearly designed for consoles, many things you just want to do are going to be nested in menu after menu, it's so jarring and clunky I don't possibly know how they could go from Fallout 3/New Vegas to this. There is no planet map either, when you are on a planet all you get are dots which vaguely suggest elevation and then you get icons for things you have explored.

The exploration in the game is lacking, think No Man's Sky on launch, very quickly you'll see the repetition of the procedural generation. Caves are mostly the same every time, you'll find the same abandoned power substations and so on.

Then there's the scanning aspect, something I looked forward to - this is essentially wander around barren wastelands and hope that certain mobs spawn that you can then press E on in scan mode. That's bland, but sure it's serviceable at best, the issue comes from bugged spawns of mobs, very often you'll find that you get stuck on finding the last Fauna on a planet. You may see that Swamp is at 87% completion, but you can wander around for hours and not find that last Fauna.

The game doesn't tell you or hint in any way, but you may NEVER find that last Fauna, instead you must go to the edge of the biome from the planets map until it says Swamp (Coast) which will mirror the Swamp completion percentage but really this may be where the last Fauna is. It's likely some fish in a pond, which means you need to wander around until you find bodies of water, this can also take a while. To top off this terrible experience you'll likely encounter that the last Fauna spawn is bugged! You can never complete the survey mission you are given.

I've spent the last 3 hours of my playtime trying to complete a mission to survey a given planet only to have to google stuff 3 times because the games design is so un-intuitive and cryptic, not to mention it's generally buggy to the point you'll likely get quests you can never complete. The last 3 hours of playtime has been a complete waste, this question cannot be completed, if I didn't receive this as an AMD promo then i'd refund.

I don't feel like this game actually does anything great, at best there's a thing or two that are mediocre to decent, but anything that is alright is immediately ruined by everything else. If I could get a refund on the hours of my life spent on this game I would, such a waste of time.

I wish I could play this game more, but the audio implementation is bugged for a portion of the user base myself included.

This specifically is to do with speech, if I have the speech volume at 1%, some of the dialog is very quiet to the point of not being able to hear it and some of it is eardrum-burstingly loud. There is no solution to this as turning the volume down/up would resort in half of the dialog being literally silent or half of it being stupidly loud.

It's a shame this issue has been reported in the discussions/forums for years and there's not been a single acknowledgement of this issue, would refund if I could but this was unfortunately bought as a gift.

The game itself is great albeit seemingly a bit shorter than 2 and/or 3, graphically gorgeous, gameplay is great and everything you'd expect from Ratchet and Clank.

The issue I have is that the game is not polished. I get frequent crashes about once every hour when going through a rift. Not only that but I did experience one game breaking bug where I had to revert to a previous save, losing 2 hours of progress. I completed a side quest to collect 60 items to receive a collectable for a planet only to crash a few minutes later. After the crash I had a save after the point of receiving the collectable for the planet but I no longer had it, with no way to re-attain it. This was a softlock for 100% completion but thankfully I noticed a few minutes after, shame my previous save was a couple of hours before that though.

Once this is polished I can absolutely recommend this, but there has not been any more patches or discussion after the previous ray tracing and reflections patch. I do hope this gets fixed because it's a great game, but I can't recommend this in its current state.

This is a widely known issue and Digital Foundry has commented on this in their PC review of the game where all 3 of the guys there experienced the same issues.

I like the game overall, the art style is good, the general gameplay is good apart from being a bit grindy.

Core Keeper however, should not have a Verified rating on steam deck, it can't maintain a stable 30/40fps and dips into low twenties regularly alongside stuttering. This runs worse on all low than Elden Ring at medium / high settings on the Steam Deck. I don't expect a perfect 60, but I do think the game should run significantly better than it currently does.

I'd give it a complete pass on the performance issues on Deck if it weren't marked as Verified, I understand it's early access but it's a bit misleading.

I'd say in it's current state it's worth the price tag and I've enjoyed my time with it. As some reviews have said, it is a little rough around the edges, with certain things being a bit jank. If you can look past that those clunky parts it's a great game that has a relaxed atmosphere, the planet has different interesting places to find and the progression is reasonably paced so it does keep you playing however at a certain point it does slow down dramatically. In future updates it'd be nice to get have the building a bit more polished and mainly the planet being expanded as I think that's where the game REALLY excels. I think the development is on the right tracks and I'm happy to support the dev(s) as it stands.

Game doesn't let you build a new raft no matter what, wasn't aware of this, went onto a nearby island whilst my raft floated away thinking I could make a new one. Turns out the world is also stored local to your raft, so if you let it float away things will despawn, even if you're on an island it'll despawn after a few minutes.

Seems like this has several years left of development to be honest, such a simple feature of creating another raft just isn't supported.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ass trash that stinks worse than Frodo's sweaty ♥♥♥♥.

CDPR, don't lie about what's in your game, don't lie about you not knowing how broken this garbage game is, and don't lie to everyone with crappy ambiguous roadmaps which only 1 of the items was met and the rest were missed.

Re-reviewing the game since the recent major update.

Loving the gameplay, I don't really agree with the negative reviews about the meta-progression, if you know about that before going in then I don't see the problem, it's definitely not for everyone though. If you like Rogue Legacy and how the progression in that works then this is similar.

Previously I was getting crashing every 5-15 minutes for months which made me unable to recommend the game, however this seems to be fixed now so I can safely recommend it.

I would like performance to be improved though, for a 2080ti I am getting about 80fps, there's several areas I can see that can be optimised. For example when I hover over an item in the shop, for a second or two afterwards I get about a 50% drop in frame rate, I can then switch to another item and my frame rate drops by another 50%, I can tank my frames quickly hovering over different items in the shop.

There's several other similar issues which do make the game feel a bit clunky and sluggish, I think a proper optimisation pass for the game would be a good step in tightening up the experience.