4/5 ★ – Just_Deli's review of Core Keeper.

Core Keeper is such a gem. Sometime in the last 2-3 years, I discovered that my favorite genre of game is a survival/crafting/boss rush style game. Corekeeper is just that. It shares a similar art style to the survival/crafting king Terraria and takes a unique spin on the genre with an isometric "ARPG" camera angle and controls.Fighting bosses and venturing further from the "Core" is the name of the game as you progressively get stronger doing so. A unique feature I really liked is the OSRS-like skills that you level up by doing that task, each with their own skill trees that give bonuses to your character. Mining rocks levels your mining, walking levels endurance, hitting enemies with swords and axes levels melee, and shooting enemies with bows and arrows (or other weapons) levels your ranged. There is magic, fishing, cooking, farming, you name it, and each featured a skill tree offering several bonuses for putting points in each node. All of that, on top of passives you can earn for taking down the main game's bosses, tons of armor and weapon sets that each had unique properties that could be used to build your character the way you wanted to. I played this with a friend, and I focused on melee weapons and armor, while my friend used magic and spells. I did a lot of mining for resources, while he spent a ton of time fishing and cooking to make us foods that gave buffs and upgrades. There is a lot I could say about this game, but to keep it short, the final thing I will leave is that this game lets you build some automation systems. So, for getting resources that were important for upgrading your armor, weapons and building bigger and better things, you needed a lot of them. You eventually unlock the ability to build things like mining drills that could be connected to conveyor belts and then have little machines insert them into chests automatically and even have them smelt the ores for you. While I don't think its automation systems are to the level of a game like Factorio or Satisfactory, these systems were really fun to learn and mess with, and it has really piqued my interest towards playing those two games I just mentioned.