Recommended : NOT

Block Story is survival craft voxel game.


[positive side]

+RPG system with many skills to improve
+ All creatures seem tamable (friendly, neutral & hostile)
+ You can travel between generated worlds (infinite ressources)
+ Tp system thru beds and tools in same world
+ Tutorial from NPC missions
+ Dragon system
+ Respec (with diamonds)
+ You can earn diamonds slowly in-game (microtransaction)
+ Achievements in-game & Steam


[negative side]

- Short inventory, especially when you need to carry many tools
- Fighting too close friendly NPC turn them agressive against you
- Blocking NPC especialy in tiny corridor or when they stand near doors
- Generated worlds with huge caves that require flying to explore (hard at game begining)
- Game too easy & fast with microtransaction based on diamonds
- Forging bars & repairing items require too many time like stupid MMO to force you to spend diamonds to short delay (no need that ♥♥♥♥ in solo game paid at full price, for example about 40 mn to repair 1 jewel with hammer)
- You seem Tp verticaly and if you meet something solid you stay at higher solid block above bed
- NPC & creature can't stay at floor where spawmer is, "they shrink like they are in water", on floor deeper (very bad management from solid block)
- No multiplayer for fun


[- negative from version before beta]
- no update since more than 1 year for version < beta
- dev delete all thread on forum that report no update or ask for more content because console version is updated


For 2.99 USD or less you can buy it but i don't recommend it.
I really don't accept you can craft with no delay but you need time to forge bars and repair stuff. These delays ruin game and are only implemented to force you to spend diamonds to short time required. If Dev need more money, he just have to raise purchase price instead of poluate game with microtransactions with diamonds to force you to spend it.


You can play this free to play with cosmetic microtransactions only like Path of Exile :

http://store.steampowered.com/app/280790/

instead of Block Story.

EDIT 2023: Creativerse isn't free to play now.

Lets pretend for a moment that you have absolutley no idea what this game is, and the past of this game on Steam (with the developers snapping at the community and refusing to update the game on EA and then just dump it as a complete game.) With all of that you'd think that ths is like the StarForge fiasco on a smaller scale. But lets forget that, and instead focus on how lacking, dull, and unfinshed this game feels.

Optimization
The game runs surprisingly well. On my old 2010 Notebook I can get an adverage of 50-60 FPS which is actually great! On my full computer (What I am typing this review with) it gives me about 300-400 FPS while not noticable by the human eye (no joke intended) it still is surprisingly well optimized given what this game is.

The World:
For an open-world Sandbox game the world feels surprisingly dead and static. For something that most other sandbox games do excellently (Minecraft and Creativerse most specifically) is the idea that once you expand and build and upgrade your character and world it will not only make you feel, well, accomplished but also it would feel like it was changing, like YOU were changing it. Here however the world just feels dead but surprisingly cluttered. There are randomly generated building and tons of NPCs but they have no reason, or just feel like they aren't adding anything. Top that with Water physics that don't even move (Which is a sing for Sandbox Survival games like this) and the lack of leaf decay makes the world feel astonishingly static, as if nothing will change, and for the most part nothing does. Although for what it is worth, the world generation looks very nice with long plains and deserts with massive forests spread around and they are almost fun to explore. (almost) I guess I should also mention the endless all that the world presents, where it will generate endlessly up and endlessly down. While this sounds awesome on paper, it truley is just that, awesome on paper, it is impossible for the idea of an unlimited cave system and unlimited sky lands to be fun and feel complete exploring. If there is no end then the player feels like it made no progress, and with no feeling of progress leaves me to turn off the game. Boss monster spawn without reasons and vanish without reason. There is no ecosystem feeling here. The random building are floating above nothing and some features (like weather) have no effect and just look and feel like they were added just to appease fans of realistic enviroments. The world, from a distance, looks nice with a great lighting engine to boot. But, get too close and it's true ugly head revils itself. The textures are detailed and fit nicley for the most part (Some don't blend well as if their art style was completley differnt.

The Combat:
It is awful. Now, Minecraft's combat (Block Story's main competator) is surprisingly good for what it is trying to do, and as of 1.9 is actually pretty great. Block Story's combat however is an obveous tide from it's ancient mobile days. It truley does feel unsatisfying and looks performs more like your weekly Clash of Clans rip-off than anything. You click once and then you hit it if your close or not, the hitboxes make it so as long as you are somewhere near it then it will register which is very poor feeling. It truly is hard to put into words on how bad the combat feels. You tap, and it does it, it just feels awful. If there is anything good to say, you can spend your upgrade points on damage upgrades so you don't have to fight at all.

Mobile Holdovers:
This was once a mobile game. Which wouldn't be a problem if the game acted like a compotent 2.99 dollar game. There are microtransactions everywhere, sure you can earn the gems in game (like most other Microtrasnaction heavy games that are FREE on MOBILE) but it surley will take you a while to get EVEN ONE. Over 2 hours of gameplay and I had yet to get one gem, sure it may be random, however it shouldn't even be in a game that we payed 2.99 (which isn't as bad but still) for. Here is a kicker. The Microtransactions take center stage when you open the inventory and start to smelt items. Each item, (Iron Ore) which is fastest item to my knowledge to smelt, how long does it take without Microtransactions? 5 minutes. Yes Creativerse does have timers, however they don't use Microtransactions making it fair for all players. Additionally of the total 25 slots in the inventory to store stuff you get a mere 10 without paying 275 gems for an additonal 5 rows. which basically means that to unlock your entire inventory you need about 6.70 to do so which is rediculous considering that is over 2 times over the price people payed for the game.

Music:
It comes out of nowhere and constantly plays without reason and sounds awful. There are some interesting pieces of music here but the instrumentation and mixing is so awful (and the really bad midi soundfont they used) which makes it sound cheap and really ear grating after only an hour of playing.

Overall:
Block Story is sadly still very unfinished in it's "finished" state and with the developers being quiet since the release [Except for a Christmas update a week late. But still an update nontheless got to give em positive moral points for that] and other people slowly realizing the problems I wouldn't be surprised if this game is forgotten with time. And with all of the problems that I have encountered it would probaly be for the better if this were to happen. There are some good things, but they are overshadowed by the microtransactons, poor combat, dead world, and ear grating music. Don't get me wrong, I REALLY tried hard to like this game. I really tried. But, it just got wrose, wrose, and even more empty feeling and heartless and basically pasionless as it went on.

If you enjoyed this review check out some of my other reviews (and some of my fellow reviewers) at Completing the Backlog

Worst fu♥king game I ever played. I want to go back in time and at gun point tell myself not to buy that piece of garbage. Please do not waste your time even thinking about buying this game.

Do not buy this game.

I'm going to have to give this game a 'not recommended.' It has a ton of potential, and as is, could be fun, but it appears to be DOA on the PC.

No updates in 8 months for an Early Access game is not acceptable, especially considering the numerous promises from the Devs (June! er.. July!...er.. Oct... I mean Dec!... ... ... <crickets>)

Don't buy this game, it's a total mess

This minecraft ripoff is 12 years in development, 12 years cash grabbing on multiple platforms while pretending to be something.

They are selling you this ancient mobile game with no patching whatsoever, not bringing anything new to the table like if it was a new game. They even have some leftovers from the ads they had on mobile!

People code minecraft clones in 12 days as their school projects yet these guys haven't even yet rewritten their crap fully on C# in 12 years. No multiplayer (even though steamworks is with them now), inventory system is absolutely diabolically written, movement mechanics are a surprise to experience.

I originally bought this game while it was still in Early Access, long before it went to the pay model it adopted on release. And to be honest, I'd already uninstalled it before release because it was already a fairly tedious game not improved by the odd loading limitations of the world chunks. I can't say I was enthused when I heard about the new pay model, but as the devs claimed the game was fully playable without, I thought I'd give it a fair chance.

One thing I will give them: the world looks much better now that it's loading larger chunks, or else loading them faster. And the topography of the world section I've been playing in is much more realistic, whereas it used to just climb off into Escheresque directions at random. Water physics is still confusing, where you think you're going to float, and sometimes you do, and sometimes you end up at the bottom of a ravine. The 'village' you start in is rather charmingly constructed, at least. And speaking of charming, the baby dragon is a nice touch.

As to whether the game is playable without pouring cash into it...well, that depends. Do you have a high threshold for tedium? Because this has not changed. To be fair, it hasn't changed one single bit--as far as I can tell, they haven't slowed down any of the processes from what I remember. It's just that it's exactly as bad as I remember. Your tools last practically no time at all, whether they're constructed of stone or iron. The higher the tier, the faster it goes, but pretty soon you feel like you're spending all your time mining just to replace your tools so you can mine some more to replace your tools. The dragon is cute and quite useful in the outset, but I already feel like I'm going to be spending all the time I'm not mining trying to keep it fed. And in order to feed it, I could keep giving it apples, at least until I run out locally...or I could give it meat from animals I have to run down to kill, while they're healing obscenely fast, so that I always need to hit them one more time than I should, wearing out my weapon quicker, which I'll have to--you guessed it--mine to replace my tools and restock my coal and build more furnaces to smelt a single bar of iron over four minutes to replace the weapon so I can keep my baby dragon from starving. Or I could throw money at the problem. (The ability to throw money at the problem is literally the only time improvement I'm seeing here from pre-release.)

Yes, diamonds have been dropping in-game, but not fast enough that I feel like I can grind my way out of this. On the whole, the game is just slow. Painfully slow. And I'm literally achievement-hunting a game where I'm waiting for potted plants to grow, but at least I can leave that up and switch to another window. Considering that we're supposedly able to take or leave the new pay system, and considering that by choosing to leave it, this is almost exactly the same game I've been playing all along, I'm going to have to say that the same flaws that made me uninstall it the first time around are still present and have resulted in a game that's more of a slog than a grind. With all the other sandbox games in my library (and with all the new ones coming out), I just can't see wasting any more time with this one.

Terrible Minecraft ripoff... A game I HIGHLY regret ever downloading. Can't even adjust the mouse sensitivity.

THIS GAME IS STUPID YOU GET BANNED FOR YOUR OWN FRICKING OPINION OF THE GOD DANG GAME DONT WASTE YOUR MONEY.

Block Story is a Minecraft knockoff, with more bugs than the underside of a mossy log. I gave it a try and I really just can't recommend it. The texture pack they used on Block Story, looks a lot like the High Def texture pack mod that can be downloaded for Minecraft. Parts of the world load so slowly that NPC's, and Animals look like they are floating in the air. The action bar only lets you hold a few things at a time, and the inventory space is smaller than Minecraft. I'm not entirely sure about the crafting catalogue as I didn't go that far into it, but what I have seen I was completely unimpressed with. Honestly folks, if you want to play a game like this, go with Minecraft. You can download Mods to add NPC's, or upgrade the textures, and you won't have as many bugs.