3/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Raft.

After spending the past two or so months on this game with my girlfriend I'm very mixed on how I feel about it's conclusion. It's a heavily flawed experience that still manages to excel through its seemingly endless, albeit mindless, tedium of collecting resources through it's never ending stream of supplies on the water's surface. Raft unfortunately suffers from a lot of bugs, glitches and downright dysfunctional game design, but it still managed to scratch that itch I was looking to experience nonetheless. It's one of those games that I can recognize it's flaws from the outside looking in, but while playing it, its imperfections are a lot more charming up close. In Raft you do what you do in any survival sandbox game, collect resources, craft and build. It doesn't to anything particularly "revolutionary" in this department outside of the endless stream of resources that make their way to you instead of the other way around, but it's still an incredibly satisfying loop. The early game of Raft is where it shines best as everything feels like natural progression, as your inventory grows with new items your raft also expands in the process. Raft captures this certain gameplay flow that only the best survival games are able to capture, rewarding resource gathering with fun and unique items to contrast your efforts. Unfortunately at one point this loop comes to a standstill as to progress and get more items you need to play through the games narrative and story island progression system. One of my biggest issues with Raft is how it's structured beyond the first couple hours of gameplay, and how it's mandatory islands affect it. Raft's story feels like a last minute idea, as you can pretty much skip the entire thing and feel no different afterward. There were a lot of points throughout the game where you as a player can ask yourself, "how did this world get like this", or you'll stumble upon a statue and ask why this is here. Unfortunately Raft's narrative never really lets you discover, and any questions you have are almost immediately answered through blatant world building or dialogue. You're always told about what you're meant to do and where you're meant to go directly and I find one of the biggest strength's of the genre to be natural discovery, which is something Raft doesn't really have. Instead of naturally stumbling upon the Radio Tower, the first of this game's islands, you just follow a blinking blue dot on a map and wait until you reach it, It just feels so hollow in comparison to how some other survival sandbox games go about progression. Grounded is another survival game I played somewhat recently, and after playing Raft, it gave me some newfound appreciation for how great Grounded actually is. The entirely of that game is focused on discovery, and while you can't interact with everything right away, the slow metroidvania-esque progression of items and materials makes that survival sandbox of resource gathering and progression flow for the entire game. For Raft that flow just stops once you have to start going onto story islands and since there's nothing to naturally discover it and really makes exploring the actual islands a lot less exciting in the process. Without getting into spoilers, the islands themselves are a bit of a mixed bag, some of them are genuinely fun like Temperance, while others like Balboa are bloated and kind of feel disjointed in a game like Raft. The ocean is also a lot emptier than I had hoped, unless you're docked at an island or story island, there's nothing but the shark to discover in the waters surrounding your raft. Raft consistently feels like a game where it's developers only scratched the surface of what could have been done with its concept. It's a game with so much potential, but falters in so many areas and makes Raft a lot lesser of an experience than It could have been. And while me and my girlfriend had a blast playing Raft, I still wish I was able to get more out of it.