4/5 ★ – jared_c's review of The Planet Crafter.

Planet Crafter is a 1st person base building survival crafting game. Your player crash lands on a planet with just a few tools and resources, and are told to make your way on this foreign planet. There are no enemies or hostile creatures, so a pretty relaxing experience there compared to most survival crafting games but you do still have oxygen, health, and food meters to worry about. There's a great sense of progression here, where you will steadily unlock more tools, items, or abilities throughout even just by exploring your world. You can choose (and should) to expedite these unlocks faster by building machines that help in terraforming your new planet. There is a sense of excitement from start to end of when you get that notification that you can now craft a brand new machine or upgrade to your character that never really goes away. There are multiple biomes on the planet with their own environment that vary greatly. Some are much more hazardous than others, needing to advance a good bit into the game before being able to truly explore. These all keep the game fresh as you try to solve the puzzles of how to explore these areas and slowly uncovering the subtle story here. There is a story that can be found via messages you receive from your home base, as well as computer logs found all over the planet. It's nothing too crazy or exciting, but given most of these games typically just ask you to survive, it's a fun little distraction. I really only have two complaints about this game, both being relatively minor. The first is the difficulty, or lack thereof. Apart from the one or two times I got absolutely lost and died due to running out of oxygen or water, the game is really safe and easy. I'm glad there were no hostile enemies as this was my fun turn the brain off game, but at the same time the stakes should have been maybe a little higher somehow. My other complaint being the grind towards the end of the game. Unlocks come pretty quick and easy for the first 50 hours of my game, the next 10 slowing down quite a bit, then at that point slow to an absolute crawl. That last small percentage of upgrades needing to finish the game gets pretty insane. After realizing how much longer it would take just to finish the last bit, I installed the mod that gives access to the dev console for the game just so I wouldn't have to significantly increase play time for such a small payoff. All in all, this was a really fun, addicting, and relaxing open world survival crafting game that I highly recommend. The devs for this game just recently released a DLC, giving access to a whole new planet to explore, and have been pretty consistent with patches and updates to the game!