An early look at the 2D sandbox adventure
Games like Terraria are a dime-a-dozen these days. From being inspired by Minecraft to becoming a genre of its own, it’s the next survival game in terms of genre saturation.
In order to stand out in the saturated market, a game has to do something special, or be especially well polished to get eyes on it. Can Core Keeper manage to do either of these, or will it find itself buried in the cacophony of releases?
Full disclosure to begin with: I played a press copy of Core Keeper. This means that while you could play the game with up to eight friends, I played it alone and fought through the world on my lonesome.
The goal of Core Keeper is to find a way to power-up the titular Core, but to do this you’ll need to fight through bosses, build whole structures and farm your own crops to survive. You have three different factors to deal with: health, food and the durability of your tools.
Health is rather self-explanatory, but pay special attention to your food since if that hits zero, you’ll start starving to death and losing health rapidly. Your tools are the key to your survival, they’re how you’ll mine and plant crops, so make sure you always have a spare in your backpack!
Throughout Core Keeper you’ll encounter a whole host of enemies that you have to defend your Core from, such as Slimes. To help with this, you’re able to craft weapons with the resources you find around you and defend yourself, but be careful.
Running out of resources at any point can be a death sentence, and you’ll find yourself swarmed by mobs of enemies. There’s not a huge amount of content in this early open Alpha, but there’s enough to keep you occupied for enough to get a grasp of the game and decide whether you like it or not (spoiler: you’ll like it).
If you die, you’re reborn through the Core and your tombstone will still remain in the world for you to collect, along with all of your dropped belongings. Funnily enough, you also collect the physical tombstone left behind, so if you’re grim enough you can start your own graveyard.
There’s three mysterious structures around the core, all present for different things, all of them requiring a crystal. I won't spoil what these are, but one of them isn’t available during this early Alpha. Still, the other two are available, so try your best to power these up...
Core Keeper is a rather fun resource-manager and dungeon builder. Comparisons to Terraria and Starbound will be frequent and are founded in truth, but Core Keeper adds a flavour to it not found in the other titles.
It's one to keep an eye on as it enters into the early stages of open development, and might be a title we’re still discussing in the future.
Article by Ryan Easby
