So ostensibly this website and associated YouTube is still run by two of us, and another particular example of Tim’s influence in my life is the sort of games I end up playing. Essentially, Tim fucking LOVES a survival-crafting game. I think there’s a couple of quite specific reasons for that: he’s very mechanically minded when it comes to video games and-so he likes games with a lot of mechanisms which interlock and interact together nicely. The other thing is that our boy loves some progression. You put him in a game where you can make the numbers get bigger and there are ways to improve the speed at which the numbers get bigger, he’s gonna be into that.
Survival crafters feature both of these things, they’re usually mechanically focused (given that the majority of the game tends to be focused on mechanisms for mining/looting/combat and then crafting better gear to improve your ability to mine/loot/fight) and it almost goes without saying that they all feature a lot of progression (you always start by combing two sticks to make a bow, and then you combine three sticks, two scrap metal and the spit of an ethereal dragonfly and you create a plasma rifle).
Because of this predilection I have played A LOT of survival crafters in the past decade and honestly for the vast majority I don’t have a lot to say about them. There are an awful we played for maybe one or two sessions and I just found quite boring, which doesn’t make for a great review, but there have been a few that I have absolutely loved. So, I thought I might do one big review and talk about my experience in all of them as a way of getting everything done at once.
I’ll start off with a few mini-rules. One: as I already have a full review of Subnautica on the channel I won’t touch on that, but it is worth mentioning that as far as I’m concerned, that right there is THE Gold Standard when it comes to survival crafters.
Two: we have played a few of the much older games of the genre like Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved, but this was a long time ago and at this point I wouldn’t even be able to remember how bored I was playing them.
Three: a very important consideration is that with absolutely no exceptions, these were all games I played multiplayer with my group. This does mean that there’s consistency within this review, but also means that enjoyment may not necessarily translate to singleplayer. I mention this because even the games I will review poorly here, I actually still often somewhat had fun playing PURELY because I was playing with friends. To add to this, that also means that if I played any of these for ANY length of time solo, they were a diamond amongst the rest.
And lastly, four: I reserve the right to arbitrarily not mention a few of the games which COULD be classified as survival crafting (like Minecraft, Terraria and Stardew Valley) but which probably deserve their own review (and we do have a review of Minecraft already)…
Anyway… Enough foreplay, time’s up. Let’s do this! LEEEERO-
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Let’s start off with some weak-sauce. Grounded came into the scene with an absolutely killer theme. “Honey I Shrank the Kids” as a survival crafter actually sounds like a really cool idea for a setting and did seem to scream potential. I mean, fighting giant spiders and ants and stuff is basically the stuff of nightmares so the setting alone has a lot of potential. And for me personally, riding around on giant dandelions in the original Bugs Life video game is a core memory, so if they could replicate that feeling, ooooo boy!
However, even when played as a foursome back when the game first released on Xbox Game Pass, something about Grounded just didn’t click for any of us. I think it’s partly the cheesy, cartoon-y aesthetic (which just felt a bit generic to me), partly that the progression just felt a bit narrow and unexciting and also very likely because we played it during early access when it was janky as hell and the progression didn’t go much further than a few hours and so it’s almost certainly a LOT better now…
On top of that, I remember not really finding the giant bugs quite as horrific as I was hoping, so the whole theme fell a bit flat, and I was really expecting that to do a lot of the heavy lifting there.
I make no excuses. We didn’t give this one a fair shake and so I wouldn’t be surprised if this rating is basically both unfair and incorrect. However, even if it’s good now, it was just relatively uninspiring at the time.
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This is something of an OG for my gaming group. I think every 2 or 3 years there is a big update for the game, Jroy watches a video on YouTube about making elaborate missiles and we all pile into the game. Tim gets hyped as shit making a big moon base. I make the EXACT god-damned-same mining ship every time. And then when it gets to the point where you actually need to start grinding insane amounts of resources in order to expand to get really properly big and exciting ships we all simultaneously lose interest.
Space Engineers genuinely has a lot going for it. The “semi-hard” physics approach to designing ships, needing to manage oxygen and fuel chains, power and all the crazy stuff you can do with scripts definitely means the game has legs. It also still genuinely holds up despite its age at this point. It looks pretty good and it’s
The downside is I feel that at some point the fact that it really isn’t anything more than a pretty cool lego set becomes extremely obvious. There are no objectives beyond the sort of classic Minecraft-style survival crafter objectives of “become self-sufficient” which then morphs into “build the biggest and coolest thing you can think of”. And unfortunately if you aren’t grabbed by some gargantuan project, it’s very easy to fall off after you get past the first hurdle.
Beyond the capacity of its lego set, unfortunately everything else is in the game is really just not enough to make up the difference. Combat is fucking annoying (as you might expect of something trying to be a “realistic” space sim) in the sense that it’s really, REALLY punishing with an extremely steep learning curve. As you really don’t want to risk your ship you just spent 8 hours building getting pulverised when you fail at fighting a basic pirate and then crash into an asteroid, you often try and avoid combat anyway. And in terms of exploration, while its visually satisfying, there really is absolutely zero point to exploring after you’ve gotten access to most of the basic resources.
Not that there’s really much benefit to combat anyway and any progression is more-or-less 100% player defined. For us the edge of our interest is always that self-sufficiency hurdle. As soon as we have a base with internal oxygen and can actually mine materials to expand at anything approaching a medium speed, suddenly the early game is over and it just turns into a grind.
I will say that in the end, it is pretty bloody good, but it’s not a GOAT.
As an addendum, as Space Engineers is one of the good ones on this list, I will add that I would absolutely not and have never played it single-player. This for me is a game which was only good multiplayer (and I’ve enjoyed lego sets like Minecraft solo, so take that for whatever it means).
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Astroneer was probably a mistake in terms of expectations more than anything else really. Tim and I saw this as a new and maybe less-punishing Space Engineers. If you know the game at all, you will already know: it is not that. It is an extremely simple and straight-forward space exploration and mining game. As soon as you can travel between planets you’ve basically won the game. You just go to each new place, plonk down the exact same structures, power generators and chemical refineries, mine whatever new resource the new place gives you and then you combine it into some new structural recipe (most of which have this big BLOBBY look which is unique enough but not precisely my jam).
Oh, and you dig massive holes so you can store all the resources you get, because the actual storage containers are too small (which always made the autistic part of my brain itch).
This should be approached as more of a “cosy space crafter” game than anything remotely approaching Space Engineers, so that’s probably on me for having the wrong expectations. However, in a few sessions I was quite simply bored and we never returned to it.
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Boring. End of.
Tim and I played two sessions where we battled a bunch of scrap robots and built a janky buggy together and by that point we were already really stretching the limits of enjoyment of the game. Plus, again like with some of the others, I hated the aesthetic. This time it felt like a sort of Playmobile-esque type of style, as if everything was a toy or made of plastic.
Honestly, I don’t remember it well enough to be extremely detailed, but I think at least part of the issue was that it had a pretty similar loop to Space Engineers in the sense that 90% of the enjoyment is meant to come from the construction aspect. Sure, there may have been AI robots to go and kill, but it felt like the primary aim of the game was to build a functioning settlement which was actually quite tedious to do. Then, the quote-unquote fun of the game was in building zany, wacky contraptions and vehicles and once you’ve built one kinda silly, janky jeep where do you go from there? You either push through that feeling of it being a bit boring to try and build more weird contraptions or just give up, which is what we did.
I also do feel at least somewhat more vindicated in my judgement of Scrap Mechanic because when I checked out the Steam page in writing this review, it appears to still be in early access (despite starting early access in 2016) and there have been no major developments for the last THREE years. Even if this had the makings of a banger, it seems very likely its development has been abandoned.
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A novel premise which genuinely started off fairly tense. You are plonked in the middle of the ocean on a tiny patch of floating wood and you drift around on current grabbing floating resources to expand your raft. The raft itself becomes both your vehicle and base (and I do have a soft-spot for this format of survival crafting, where your base itself travels – see also Spiritfarer and the Alters) where you expand the raft, add planters for food, sails, automatic scrap collection and more.
On top of the fairly interesting premise, my own fear of sharks and deep water meant that even after a few hours of playing Raft I found it somewhat engaging to play, because every time the shark starts gnawing on the raft I would lose my shit.
The progression was awful though. By mid-game when you already have a gigantic floating palace of a raft, harvesting thousands of resources, it didn’t really feel like we were making that much new or interesting stuff. It also felt broadly very aimless. Yes, you can deliberately sail around to specific islands searching for radio signals and the like, but to be frank it never felt that varied or exciting. Turns out sailing around on a dead calm sea with nothing to see but sea for hours is just a bit tedious.
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There’s been a bit too much whinging done in a row, so now let’s talk about something fucking GOOD.
I remember when Tim made me get Valheim. I remember seeing the weird-ass PS2-era visuals, the fact that it was YET ANOTHER Nordic-inspired world and game, the fact that yes it was another survival-crafter, and my reaction was the same it always is: “wow I’m gonna find this boring”.
Good lord I could not have been more wrong.
What’s really surprising to me is that of all of the games I’ve mentioned so far, Valheim is actually potentially one of the slowest. Farming resources takes time and is a grind. Building any kind of structure or ship takes effort. Even as you get into the mid/later game this actually only becomes more pronounced because you will need to go on long-ass sea voyages to mountains to farm resources and then sail them back to your base (because while you can make portals in later stages, anything of ANY value can’t be carried through the portals).
Despite this genuinely tedious-SOUNDING gameplay loop, I actually found it to be one of the most rewarding. It was slow, plodding and methodical and that also meant that every single step up the ladder felt well-earned. When you finally got enough iron to get a full set of iron armour, holy SHIT that was a big deal.
The progression of the game is also fabulous because it just feels like everything really neatly feeds into every other aspect. The main thing you are doing is basically trying to kill all the big bosses of the world. That means you need to get the weapons/armour to fight them, which means expanding to explore different zones and dungeons, farming new resources, using those new resources to expand your main home base, expanding your farming capacity at your base to make the resource gathering and exploration smoother. It all just clicks nicely into place, piece by piece.
Then the base-building itself is honestly amazing. Using some form of physics and material “stress” you can’t just build completely BONKERS structures which defy physics (although obviously some players manage to do that anyway), which then gives your buildings a really nice and grounded feeling. Plus, all the necessary expansions for your base also make it nicer and better to rest there, so you actually feel somewhat compelled to expand and make your base nicer and prettier because you spend so much time there, which very nicely emulates how I felt with Subnautica. The base-building for “fun” and not for purpose simply feels like an integral part of the experience.
It’s completely organic how one just develops one’s own projects and how these projects often feel actually quite important for progression. Like, don’t you understand, we NEED to build this massive Great Hall because we need all the added rested bonus from the different decorations. Plus, we can just have one banner to give us the rested bonus, that looks awkward, no we need the space to have 2, no FOUR of them. And seeing as we’re building it, we might as well add enough bedrooms and crafting space for everyone in the group can use it at the same time!
Added on top of this, the combat is actually pretty engaging in its own right and was definitely very enjoyable (even if not extremely special) given its weighty and challenging nature. And even the weird-ass aesthetic very quickly becomes charming and cool rather than anything else. This latter part in particular really stands out where my initial impression of Valheim as essentially just quite ugly has now completely changed into finding it charming, enjoyable and maybe even beautiful in a stark way.
I do feel like I should say here though that the development cycle for Valheim is absolutely fucking LUDICROUS. At time of writing Valheim has been in early access for >5 years and has had (essentially) three major content drops. It is STILL a ways away from a full version and it really feels like it is dragging its fucking feet every single step of the way there.
Valheim is always my first recommendation when it comes to survival-crafters and would also be my personal favourite were it not for the next game on this list.
Also, as this was another very positive review, I will add here that I DID play Valheim solo on a multiplayer server. As in, I would log in and progress my own house within our base when nobody else was online. This was a super zen experience but honestly even this is something I cannot see myself completing fully solo.
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A potentially contentious entry on this list because one could make the argument that it is not a survival-crafter, but instead an isometric hack-and-slash boss-encounter game. However, I think it very plainly fits the category of BOTH. The latter somewhat goes without saying as the central goal of V Rising is that you are a vampire, reborn with the purpose of fighting every single boss in the game until you finally get to fight and kill Dracula. As for the former, well, you don’t need to eat, but in order to survive the world of V Rising you do need to constantly keep your character totted up with blood, which you get from drinking from wild animals, humans and eventually captive blood bags.
So, it’s a game where you have to drink in order to stay alive, you have to manage resources and you need to build a base in order to refine the resources required to make the increasingly expensive tiers of weapons and armour. That’s a survival-crafter boys!
Where survival-crafters usually fall flat for me is the lack of overarching aim or narrative to tie it all together (which again, is why Subnautica is the gold standard). V Rising however has its combat and the goal of killing all the bosses. The combat is fast, punchy, aggressive and just extremely satisfying. It starts off relatively simple but even towards the mid-game, bosses start becoming increasingly challenging and do take genuine effort and focus to beat. It’s not quite on the level of a Souls-like don’t get me wrong, but don’t be surprised if you don’t beat every boss on the first try.
You also get access to a whole swathe of different abilities in different colour flavours (green for necromancy, blue for frost, purple for chaos and so-on) and weapons which you can mix and match, allowing for a remarkable variety in playstyles. So the combat itself is actually a pretty strong draw on its own, elevated by the desire to fight through all of the bosses and prove yourself the most powerful vampire lord.
It also, I think, has what might be the absolute best resource farming and management in any game I’ve played. First of all it introduced the “compulsively count” button (a button which allows you to stack all like items into one chest, making manual sorting the work of an instant, which is a dream for autismos like me), and the secondly it does everything I mentioned about Valheim but every bit as well.
You first need to collect leather scraps and bones to make your first tier of gear, but then you will need to smelt copper and iron and refine leather and cut wood into planks and crush gems. And the processing of these items takes real time so you need to build multiple refineries, which takes large rooms, and you’ll save resources if you use the dedicated crafting floors, and soon you need to harvest ghost crystal, mutant grease and lightning, but you still need the earlier resources and so you have to get the servant coffins and put high-tier servants into them equipped with the best gear you can so that THEY can do farming for you (also in real time) and you will need cages to imprison high-quality blood humans because you need to have high quality blood for end-game bosses so you can get their bonuses. And on and on it goes. All of this means that you HAVE to expand your vampire fortress and because you HAVE to, it means you want to, and it again switches from being something you have to do, to something you WANT to and so you add decoration and lights and thrones and all kinds of cool shit (and it really helps that it looks absolutely fucking sick as hell).
I could go on about this, how the actual farming itself somehow has a fun weight to it, how the music and visuals of the game elevate the experience, and how good it is to play with friends. However, I want to return to the boss fights themselves and also mention that come late-game the V Rising boss fights are genuinely spectacular. They are challenging as fuck, dare I say almost worthy of a Hades boss fight, and also just bloody good fun.
And I think that’s really the biggest thing about V Rising for me. It’s just damn good fun. It’s really just pretty fucking excellent and everything feeds together into one smooth, well-oiled and calibrated machine.
I do think I should also address one final thing here though before we move on. V Rising differs from every other game I’ve mentioned so far in that it features Rust-like servers with player bases, optional PvP and PvP raiding (making it one of two PvPvE games on this list).
I’m gonna be straight-up: I did not play this as a PvP game. On our “main” playthrough (for all the bosses) we did play on a public server and did get in fights and in fact even did raid another player’s base (look forward to that video), but this was a side-show to the PvE aspect and actual base-building. My understanding is that the PvP has been meta’d to absolute fuck and on top of that quite simply this is a finished game. Unlike Rust or something equivalent, there won’t be loads of constant expansions and changes to keep the PvP interesting and evolving, so I feel like every time I check the subreddit I keep seeing the PvP folks complaining about how V Rising doesn’t really click for them. But I’m not a PvP person, I’m a PvE person and I loved it, and personally I do think the PvP really is meant to only be a side-show to actually fighting the bosses.
I had an absolute blast playing V Rising and it’s potentially gonna be the highest rated game in this article, but I will also admit that unlike some of the others, now that I’ve beaten it, I don’t feel the need to go back…
Once again, as this was a positive review, from a singleplayer stance I actually think I put a fair amount of time into V Rising. I fought a lot of the mid-game bosses single-handedly (at least a decent portion) and did a fair amount of farming and crafting like that. However, again like Valheim, I simply would not play the whole thing through solo.
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Right, that’s enough praise and dick-sucking, let’s get back to the whinging.
You know when you’re on your way home and you ask your mum if you can play Valheim and she says “we have Valheim at home?” ASKA is the Valheim you have at home.
Okay, that’s not quite true and is really quite unfair actually. ASKA does superficially seem like “just another Valheim” in that you are Vikings and you do fight undead and monstrous enemies, and you do all the usual Valheim stuff of harvesting iron, trees, stone and building longhouses and cooking food for stat bonuses and all this stuff. It even has a 3rd-person camera perspective and dodge-roll based combat.
Where ASKA differs is that Valheim is all about you and your buddies, ASKA is actually Rimworld wearing the skin of Valheim. Essentially, all buildings in the game are pre-designed objects, but one of the very first things you get is a building which essentially allows you to summon villagers. Once summoned, villagers now can be tasked to harvest materials, cook food, train for combat, smelt ore, mine iron, and so basically your entire task is to automate an entire village of NPCs to do ALL of the survival crafting stuff for you.
This is, honestly, pretty fucking cool at first glance. Becoming a Jarl of your own Viking village with dozens or even hundreds of villagers who are all doing their own tasks is a super cool thing to witness. At first you’ll be very on top of schedules and who is doing what, but by the time you get to villager 100, all good intentions go and it becomes just an absolute mess of plugging holes and plonking new villagers where you feel they are needed.
What scuppers ASKA for me is the lack of a “why”. There ARE bosses in AKSA, but those actually feel like less of a big deal than in Valheim, where the next boss always feels like the goal. In ASKA those bosses do not nearly feel as integral to the experience. In fact if anything, they feel almost secondary.
The main thing to deal with is a yearly winter invasion of zombies, which requires you to have an armed and trained village militia and until your base is 100% capable of self sufficiently defending itself, you can’t focus on the other thing, which is expeditions.
Expeditions are also not really super inspiring (largely due to the fact that they’re relatively new content) in that you load a ship full of armed villagers and goods, hop into the longship and sail off into the deep blue sea to find, mostly nothing new that you haven’t already got… You do get chickens I guess?
Essentially ASKA’s current form suffers a bit too much from being too incomplete and on top of that, it’s honestly just janky as fuck. Figuring out how many of the systems work is not super easy and then it can be a bit of a crapshoot if they do actually work. Things like broken tools not being repurposed and repaired constantly plagued our village and meant that these things had to be physically dealt with by the players, which just made all the automation grind to a halt, which also made progress stall.
I will admit that it has potential, but so far ASKA has very much failed to win me over. I will also add that as this review straddles the line of positive that, this is again something I have never touched solo.
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Okay, now this particular review is gonna be a tiny bit challenging… Because it’s gonna be negative, but for the life of me I absolutely cannot explain why. Or rather, I can, but it’s not something which the game itself can be faulted for.
Let’s start with what Enshrouded is doing right. This is another multiplayer PvE survival crafter. It contains a huge (and I mean pretty fucking massive) fantasy world filled with bosses, enemies, locations, castles, towers, dungeons, all the sort of classic MMO-type stuff.
It also features really cool traversal mechanics, a bewildering array of different weapons and combat abilities. Perk and skill trees, farming mechanics, it also requires you to build a decent base because you will need to house NPCs who will become your source of crafting recipes and also quests which you do throughout the world.
In a sense it really does feel a bit like if Terraria was 3D. You need to build your base, to get an NPC, to get a quest to complete so that you can get a particular item to farm a particular resource to get a tier of item which allows you to fight the next boss. That sort of thing. It all feeds together super well.
It also features a building system which allows for, possibly, the most creative constructions in that its voxel-based. Meaning you can place walls and doors and windows and lanterns and shit, or you can trim it down to basically placing tiny little cubes and hand-make your own perfect crenelations or engravings and stuff. I haven’t had a look at the Enshrouded Subreddit, but I have zero doubt that some of the stuff people might build with his could be absolutely insane.
I just looked… Holy fucking shit…
So, this is a game which really has ALL of the building blocks to be a GOAT within the genre. Super cool building, fun and exhilarating combat, decent meta-progression and boss-progression. AND it’s actually in a handcrafted fantasy world where there MIGHT even be a story if you looked for it.
And I bounced off it harder than the Epstein accusations bounced off Trump.
Now, I did have a couple of criticisms about the game itself, most namely that I found the character design very chunky and unappealing. Looking back it actually gives me Dragon Age Veilguard-vibes in a very unpleasant way… However, this is just a minor thing which I could have gotten over. So what’s the issue?
The issue is how I played it… The problem here is (well not ME exactly, but kinda) me.
See, what happened with Enshrouded was that we got it as a group and then Tim absolutely fell in love. I was, busy for whatever reason, so when I jumped into the game the boys were now 5-10 hours into the meta-progression. I was sort of given a bunch of hand-me-down weapons and gear and we went off to fight some guys (for a perfectly serviceable fun time). I was directed who to fight and what to farm and prompted about what I could build.
I then was busy again and came back on when the meta-progression was around the 40-hour mark. And the same thing happened again…
So, I don’t know if this is a hot take here, but have you noticed that the games which I have been most glowing about in my praise were those where I felt like I had to put in the work to get to the next level?
Legitimately, I think this is the secret sauce for survival crafters. If you get your pals onto a game and give them a bunch of higher-tier gear and pull them into the quest chain where you are, yeah this allows you to play together! But it does the game a disservice! The FUN of the game comes from EARNING this stuff, feeling like you had to work to get to where you are, feeling a sense of ownership over the progression and also therefore a sense of context of how far you’ve come (and potentially how far you still have to go).
This means that actually survival crafters are a nightmare for a gaming group to maintain because unless you’re ALL on for it, someone is gonna miss out on parts of the progression and then is just gonna find the experience henceforth just kinda boring.
So, I’m sorry Enshrouded. You deserve better than the score I’m gonna give you.
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Our last entry on the list and it’s a pretty new one! It’s also got a bit of an interesting twist in how I perceive it which is potentially informative as well.
So, DuneA (“DA” is already taken after all) is another 3rd-person survival crafter, this time set in the Universe of Dune. It’s set in an alternative timeline where Paul Atreides was never born, so there is no Maud’dib and messiah but also the Atreides house still exists but locked in a stalemate power struggle over Arrakis with the Harkonnen (I’m just gonna assume you’ve not been living under a rock and have seen the movies here). You are a random “prisoner” (you’re always a godamn prisoner in these games) who escapes Sardaukar capture onto the surface of Arrakis and you now become part of the power struggle. You have to escape sandworms, pick sides between the Atreides and Harkonnens, fight Sardaukar soldiers, find out what happened to the missing Freman (whose entire people seems to have vanished), fly ornithopters and harvest spice all under the usual survival-crafting banner.
This time, kinda like V Rising, the “survival” part is a little lighter on the ground as all you really need to worry about is your water. However, the mechanics of this are pretty cool in that you basically will suck water from the dead bodies of enemies you kill, you can sacrifice better armour to use equivalent gear-level “stillsuits” (which slow down your water loss) and at higher levels you start actively harvesting dead bodies to completely drain them dry of moisture, which is metal as fuck.
Also, while on the subject of V Rising, DuneA also features a form of PvPvE. Although I feel like it maybe leans more towards the PvE side again, with PvP being a side-show. PvEvP? Does that even make sense?
It’s another of the survival crafters where the base-building REALLY integrates into the mechanics nicely. Increasingly water becomes a major limiting factor so you need harvesters of many times constantly working (and they work in real time) so that you can refine metal and ores and eventually spice.
So, with the preamble here done, let me make one thing clear about DuneA. To be completely frank (Herbert), yes, the setting is doing a LOT of the heavy lifting here. Dune is a fucking hot piece of ass right now thanks to just how fucking exceptional the films are (yes, I know the books are sci-fi royalty, but let’s not underplay how much of a cultural phenomenon the films have been). The super unique, weird-as sci-fi setting with swords and no computers and witches and magical space dust is fucking cool. Add to that all the courtly intrigue from Game of Thrones and the absolutely INSANE brutalist-style mega-architecture and ships. It’s a setting which sets the imagination on fire.
So, the fact that the game really brings that world to life and places you right smack down in it, is both a huge achievement and also provides an awful lot of good will.
Flying the ornithopters is fucking cool as shit. Avoiding the shai hulud is genuinely tense and likewise, cool as shit. The blood draining water harvesting is cool as shit. Just… Godamn it’s fucking cool.
However… It is also a pretty flawed game in a number of aspects.
Firstly, the base-building is a bit uninspiring. Of course, the devs were trying to stick with the aesthetic of the Villeneuve Dune universe, but this has the unfortunate side-effect that all bases. And I do mean ALL of them, are basically just kinda squat black bricks with hanger force-fields. Yeah, it’s fitting, but it’s pretty boring. I think we made a decent effort with our base, and even so it doesn’t precisely inspire a great deal of excitement. But I’m not sure what the best fix is there.
The game plays out in two different zones (with a couple of other mini zones), the end-game “deep desert” where you go to harvest the big quantities of end game spice. This is what one imagines for Arrakis. Endless, empty scorching dunes of sand which look like the heat is practically emanating off your monitor. Then you have the main PvE hub where you (and every other player on the server) builds your base, the Hagga Bassin. This is a (still massive) rocky, craggy desert biome filled with towering spires and deep canyons. It is also absolutely JAM FUCKING packed with raiders and crashed ships of every single type imaginable. Seriously, you cannot go two metres across this “most inhospitable landscape in the entire galaxy” without stumbling across another raider camp.
This is another issue where, quite simply the devs do kind of need to give you something to DO in the sandbox, right? But, it does also kinda spoil the vibe just a tiny bit for the desert to feel quite so alive and active.
I was also here going to complain about the “travel” map where you are put into a silly overworld travel map to go between major locations. A map which is difficult to navigate and also pointless because it could just have been a loading screen. But I actually understand this was changed in a recent patch (fuck, I can’t complain then).
Likewise, one of the biggest issues a lot of people had with the game was that the 5th and final tier of equipment in the game required obscene amounts of spice, necessitating harvesting from the Deep Desert. A place which was a PvP zone. So essentially, if you didn’t have a group of 5+ people, you could never harvest spice because you’d just get stomped. So yeah, no end-game content for you! Except they apparently have made the Deep Desert PvP optional now (FUUUUCK).
I think for me though, the biggest issue I had with DuneA was the story. And maybe this is ridiculous because I think it might be the only one on this whole fucking list which was actually even TRYING to have a story.
The problem, as far as I can see it, is that the story is so bloody slow. And I mean this in comparison to the pace of progress of the game. At the very start you escape and make your way out into Arrakis and slowly make contacts with the Atreides and Harkonnen and start doing quests and exploring and so-on. Getting involved with the power struggles. You also do a very long and exceedingly boring quest chain of following the Fremen around to unlock important items for progressing the construction of your base and so-on. It all kind of gets to a point where you BEGIN to pick a side between the houses by the time you have unlocked 80% of the building and research trees.
The point I’m making there being that the story felt like it had just gotten through the prologue AFTER I’d been playing for like 50 hours and was sort of done with the meta-progression of the game.
I appreciate that there IS a story, but the pacing is absolutely fucking whack and does not match the survival-crafting pacing whatsoever. Especially with all the added fuckery from multiplayer and people working on the same base.
All of this is to say that I think that if it weren’t for the absolutely exceptional theme doing so much heavy lifting here, DuneA would be much less exciting… But it does, and so it is.
As a final point here, DuneA is another of the (more) positive reviews but it’s also one I absolutely did not touch singleplayer and more-or-less only jumped on when others were there.
…..
Conclusions
So, this is literally the longest article I think I have ever written for MMG. I appreciate if you are still here and if you have learned anything!
I think one of the biggest take-aways here for me is my point about ownership over these sorts of games. They are an absolutely ideal multiplayer format for you and your boys, but it also necessitates getting all the guys on for basically every session and everyone knows the struggle of that.
My personal favourite of the bunch is PROBABLY V Rising, but I think it might be fair to say this is also the one which least fits the classic survival-crafting format, so maybe I’m the wrong metric for people who absolutely love something pure like Rust. For the purest survival crafting experience I think Valheim may be the new gold standard whilst for pure awe I still think Dune: Awakening has some of the most insane visuals.
Maybe drop a comment if you have any favourite survival-crafters that I’ve missed or have any thoughts of your own on these ones I’ve played?
| Game | Rating | Recommendation |
| ASKA | 62 | Niche |
| Astroneer | 53 | Niche |
| Dune: Awakening | 70 | Sale |
| Enshrouded | 67 | Sale |
| Grounded | 60 | Niche |
| Raft | 40 | Avoid |
| Scrap Mechanic | 5 | Avoid |
| Space Engineers | 69 | Sale |
| Valheim | 79 | Recommended |
| V Rising | 79 | Recommended |
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