14 DAY TRIAL // Core Keeper hits all the right words in its description: survival, open-world, crafting, exploration, and procedurally-generated. Although that should tell you a little bit about what Core Keeper is all about, it’s definitely a confirmation that it’s either good or bad.
I had a chance to spend several hours with the sandbox, survival base-building game and I was quite surprised by the variety of the gameplay features and the addictive formula. Core Keeper is developed by Pugstorm and it’s an Early Access title but trust me when I say that there’s a lot of content to go through even in this development state.
Although I can’t say I’m obsessed with having everything arranged in a certain way, I’m always looking for clean patterns when it comes to building bases in games. It’s true that you don’t get to appreciate the beauty of an outdoor landscape since everything is underground, but that leaves room for some unique base-building.
My first playthrough of Core Keeper, just like everyone else’s, starts in a very dark environment, deep underground. There’s no tutorial at all, so I just have to figure it out myself just like a castaway who has no skills and has to learn to survive.
The most basic and by far the most used activity in the game is mining. Either it’s with your bare hands or using a pickaxe, you’ll be digging deep to expand your base and find the necessary materials to continue to add all the amenities that you need to improve your tools and the habitat.
Being a sandbox has its advantages in the fact that you’re not constrained by objectives, goals or anything like that, so you can explore and try things as you explore the underground world. On the other hand, if you’re used to being guided towards various objectives, you’re probably going to hate every minute spent in Core Keeper.
That said, I very much enjoyed the progression in the game. Starting with just your bare hands in a survival game that requires a lot of digging isn’t easy, but 5 minutes into the game and I already have my first pickaxe, which reduces the hits needed to break a wall block from several to just a few.
I haven’t yet found out what’s with the strange statues near the spawning point, but at least I have a clear goal set for my character. To explore as much as possible and upgrade my tools and the buildings I can create. It’s probably the sagest approach in every survival game and it looks like it helped me in Core Keeper too.
Yes, I did die 30 minutes into the game, but at least I learned how to fight the rabid mushrooms. Enemies in Core Keeper have certain attack patterns, so learning these heavily increases your chances of survival. I learned this the hard way, but that’s how survival games convey information about mechanics.
Managing your character’s hunger is also something that you’ll have to take care of, but food is quite abundant at the start of the game, and then you can start growing your own crops. Yes, there’s farming in Core Keeper as well, not just mining, exploration, base building and a little bit of fighting.
Conclusion
There’s so much stuffed into a game that is not ever complete that I can’t not recommend it to those who love this type of games. Fishing, farming, mining, building, exploration, different biomes and a lot of exploration are the main pillars of Core Keeper. If you enjoy any of these, you’ll probably become addicted after the first few hours.
Preview code provided by the publisher
