+ Spiritual Successor for Terraria Nerds: Even though I am critical of how closely this game’s style and music lean on Terraria, I love the hell out of Tinkerlands as much as I do Terraria. Every time I boot up these kinda games its like being wrapped up by a warm blanket of good vibes. Explore places with friends, build bases and homes, create boss arenas, mine and cut.

+ Boat Gameplay Loop is Great : The game really starts to open up and become something special once you get to the first side island. Each of the new islands has a large variety of new materials to find, chests to open, and dungeons and unique bosses to encounter. Then, certain island tiers unlock progression events back at your base, such as the cursed Desert and cave corruption events. This fun, compelling loop between exploring new islands and having it affect your home island is a fantastic idea that made both exploration of new islands, and building up your home island, worth doing. You can even upgrade the boat and move your crafting to it, although it felt rather pointless to do so as you cannot customize the boat’s interior too much. Still, overall, the system bodes well for future content updates, which will ideally not require you to make entirely new worlds.

+ New Islands Find This Game’s Voice : Entirely distinct music wholly different from the base game, enemies and bosses that are fun to discover and fight, and a variety of dungeons, materials, and rewards to discover. The island system is everything Tinkerlands should lean into in establishing its own voice in this genre, I was pleasantly surprised with how much I loved the island system.

+ Dungeons are a Step in the Right Direction: I loved the cave system in the demo, and I was really excited to see them potentially expand on it to create interesting multi-level exploration with pitfalls, traps, and other unique high risk but high reward situations. To an extent, they did do so – several islands have ruins, dungeons, and cave systems to explore, many of which are maze like, have dangerous traps and enemies, and offer fun rewards to look out for. It unfortunately falls a little short, though: many of the key paths result in dead ends with seemingly no rewards to be found, you find most of the rewards within the first few minutes, and it feels like it is scraping the surface of the potential this system has.

+ Absurdly Good Value for Your Money : At $10-$12, I’ve gotten about 30 hours of a full first playthrough, and that’s with knowing a bit of the first island’s progression path in advance thanks to playing the demo. I still intend to pursue some of the rewards I never managed to grab, which might bump that time up. But for a game in early access, with plenty of content to explore with a friend? This is an incredible game that justifies its price tag very quickly.

+ Listening to the Players : To CodeManu’s credit, they are listening quite actively to player feedback. Updates happen very frequently (every week so far!) and player criticism has been taken pretty seriously. One of the best examples of this was the addition of crafting from chests, which has been an incredibly welcome addition to the game.




- Still Borrowing a Bit TOO Much from Terraria: While the later half of the game (following unlocking the ship) is refreshing and solidifies a significant departure from leaning too much on Terraria’s legacy, there’s no avoiding it: from the music of the starting biomes using the same strings and style, to using the same biomes and even many of the same bosses, Tinkerlands tends to lean far, far too much on the game that clearly inspired it. The mushroom biome music is particularly egregious, but there is just… a lot, that you can point at and go “Ah, Terraria” in the opening hours. Taken individually, any one of these things might’ve been a cheeky reference, but as a whole it diminishes the game and might make players bounce off, feeling as if it still needs to find its own voice. I’d really recommend they rework the opening, main island to have more of the charm and unique voice of the post-Ship islands.

- … Even when it doesn’t make sense, or can be improved : I said these exact same words during the demo, and to their credit, they’ve made a lot of improvements… but, it’s still a big issue. Repeat boss spawns don’t tend to reward anything worthwhile, even after they added an interesting item that “may give unique drops”. Magic still tends to be the superior choice, with half of the earned weapons failing to do anything interesting for Ranged until the end of the game, and melee just gets shafted hard. And, again - why do grappling hooks exist?! I still don't really understand why I should care about these things - in Terraria, you've got fall damage and verticality. This game doesn't have that.

- Awkward Accessory and Biome Progression : It feels like you never really get a chance to use and appreciate half of the weapons or accessories in the game for a variety of reasons. The Jungle Biome’s vine chests (yes, specifically only THOSE chests) seems to own half of the most important rewards, so after three resets of the Jungle and tons of duplicates, I was very surprised to learn I had seen only half of the accessories and that many essential ones for progress were STILL hidden in chests. Meanwhile, we ended up skipping a solid 1/3 of upgraded weapons because half of them felt like terrible downgrades, and while we were always getting pickaxe/axe upgrades, they never felt like they were ACTUAL upgrades in how fast they mined. There likely needs to be a progression rework in this area to make each upgrade feel distinctly improved from the last.

- General Gameplay Woes & Enemy Spawns: Terraria it’s pretty straightforward to fight most of the enemies in the game with all the verticality at your disposal. But with Tinkerlands being a top-down perspective, you can’t ‘jump’ over terrain, which means terrain will CONSTANTLY get in your way. Arrows will hit trees that have gigantic hitboxes, you will dash into a seashell block and take damage you otherwise would avoided. And enemy spawns are rouuuuugh. They’ve reworked this a few times and it’s definitely better than in the demo, but there are some enemies that are just infuriating to fight when you’re appropriately geared – the Sea Anemone in the last island, the Trichroma Island constantly spawning bosses that float through walls.

- No Permanence on other Islands : It sucks that you’re encouraged to reroll your entire island assortment, rather than either expanding the sides of the map (getting to ‘adventure outward’) or resetting a single tile. This means building arenas for boss fights on islands is very discouraged, and because so many items don’t drop often, you’re stuck NEEDING to reset islands if you want all of the drops. It’d also be rad if you could mark certain islands as “your main island” – for example, what if I want to build my base in a winter biome only island?



The Next Fest Demo for Tinkerlands had a lot of flaws, but was a genuinely fun experience that I was excited to play more of. And, in Early Access, the game has fixed many of those flaws! But there are quite a few still left over, the worst of which being that it may lean a bit too hard on Terraria in the beginning half.

Still, under all of that, there is soooo much potential here. And I had a really fun time with my friend playing it. And I could easily see myself replaying it with every update.

So, I recommend it for sure. At the very least, at $9 to $12, it’s a steal for the content already in the game.

Tinkerlands is what I wish Necesse or Core Keeper and any other games like this could have been.

Controller just works, something that CAN NOT be said by the likes of Terraria, Starbound, Necesse, Planet Centauri, etc. It just works! TInkerlands proves it is NOT difficult and rather a huge mistake by other dev teams to ignore it.

I know it's early access but I've had a blast playing what's available right now. The island mechanic is a lot of fun and yeah, things will be more fleshed out later, but already, exploring and finding loot is a ton of fun. Tinkerlands gets it right!

Firstly I think this game has potential. I play ALOT of these types of games (Terraria, Core keeper etc) and this one just didn't scratch the itch unfortunately. I'll continue to come back to it as updates come out though!

Cons:
The world seems barren. Just alot of trees and rocks. Even in different biomes is still feels bare and exploring is abit dull.
The progression system is abit off. I had no idea what to do after gold tools because the next boss was too hard but I couldn't go anywhere else so I felt stuck.
FISHING MINI GAME IS THE WORST! I always hate fishing mini games but I'd take Stardews 100x over this one. I'm sorry, I know you were trying to be original but it is just time consuming and would love an option to opt out of it.
The NPCs dont feel to have a purpose. They move in and then... what? I don't use their shops since making stuff myself is easier.

Pros:
This game would be fun with more people. I played solo sadly but I can see chaos and fun with others.
Combat is fun and easy. I use magic and love the range
The accessories are useful and collecting them is a fun side quest
Inventory is nice and big and not having to worry about upgrading it is a big plus

It's got potential so I hope to come back and review it again in the future :D