Posted: May 20, 2015
Early Access Review
First impressions; Steampunk Terraria clone. Sounds lame, but I love steampunk, and terraria was fun. Anyways, It's KINDA like terraria, sort of how an ice-cream sandwich is kind of like a Klondike bar. Its fun, it seems to have a fairly steep learning curve, has there isn't much of a wiki or guide yet (disappointing really, considering the game has been on IOS since 2012, it really should have a better guide) A lot of the ingame stuff is there but not polished (example, Metal pipe description is: Not a lot is known about this item. and that's pretty much what it says for every item in the game.) It IS free to play, and a lot of the stuff you have to pay for can be obtained free ingame through much grinding / farming / hopelessly searching for the one onyx that happened to spawn.
Cons: Although there are LOTS of free worlds to explore and enjoy, They are all explored / looted for the most part. I have not noticed any sort of loot respawning, or item respawning, but then again I havn't been playing that long so perhaps it's there. I payed for a "private world" to explore and build on, and that's probably the easiest cheapest way to get a good feel to the game. Another gripe I have though, is your private world is only one biome. So if you want to get diamonds for example, you need to go to an arctic world, (which is probably depleted of all natural resources) Which leaves you to either trade for it (again, most free worlds are depleted, besides the chests hidden around some of the developed worlds that give every player loot the first time they open it) or to pay for an arctic world (250 crowns is the cheapest, which works out to about 2/3 bucks)
They are working on their business model, trying to move more and more stuff outside the "paywall" which is really pretty non existent as it is, How they have stuff set up at the moment is more suited to a tablet or Ipad then a PC, Hopefully they start trying to bring in some "mixed biome" worlds. Kind of like terraria, but then again, I'm content to play the game as it is. Crafting in the game is fairly well done, besides the aforementioned lack of tool tips on the items, I'd say the crafting is more diverse than terraria, but not as diverse as Minecraft.
Pros: You could easily get 30-40 hours of enjoyment without having to pay a dime. You can play with your friends, you don't have to know how to set up port forwarding, or how to run a listen server or use the dreaded hamachi, as the company host's all the worlds on their servers, to help cut down on hacking / cheating. No wiki, (the sense of wtf do I do next, and trying to figure stuff out is fun for some people you know.) and it's steam punky!
oh and it has basic RPG elements. I think they need to refine the level system a bit however, to many stats to pick and choose from. I think it could be cut down to 5 or six. As an example Building / engineering levels are both needed to build / craft certain items. Why not combine them into one skill? who knows. These games are all about the grind, so they probably won't do that
anyways sorry for rambling. Play the game, its small, will download in 10 mins <, and it has an uninstall button, just incase you don't like it.