Craft The World

I'll craft what I want to goddamnit.

Preface: This game, like 90% of games on Steam, is Early Access.  None of what I say is guaranteed to apply to the finished product.

So. With a name like Craft The World you're probably thinking crap-ass Minecraft clone, right?  Wrong!  If you've played Dwarf Fortress, this game is Dwarf Fortress.  If not, you play the game by marking blocks to dig, marking enemies to attack, marking furniture to place, and violating the rule of threes.  You never - unless you choose to, but it's completely worthless - actually control the dwarves (or dwarfs, as this game calls them for some reason) directly.  If you see a nice vein of ore, you simply click it and wait until one of them decides to head over there and dig it out.  You're more of a God of Suggestions than anything, although your dwarves will rarely do anything on their own and will make an effort to carry out your commands.

Dwarves doing some stuff

In the above picture I have some trees set to be cut down, which Santa over there is doing, while another dwarf murders a skeleton for its precious bones.  Attacking enemies is the one thing dwarves will do autonomously, thank god.  All your standard cliché "craft em up" enemies are here, and of course they come out at night.  They'll shamble toward your base and get beaten to death once per day.  You can mark specific enemies for killing but it's usually not necessary.

Let's talk AI.  It's bad.  Every few minutes a dwarf manages to redefine the word "moron".  This is early access so hopefully it will change, but as the game exists right now you're going to have to go out of your way to rescue a dwarf every now and then.  Archers in particular don't seem to understand what a line of sight is and they always shoot their arrows at a downward trajectory.

Durr durr I'm a dwarf

The fellow you see here was shooting arrows into the wall for a solid five minutes before another dwarf climbed down and hit the monster once with his club and killed it.  Thankfully this is the exception but it still shouldn't happen.

As far as the actual game goes, there's some solid potential here.  It's obviously unfinished, but even in this state I still played it for four hours straight last night.  Your first game is almost guaranteed to end in failure as every 45 minutes a huge wave of enemies is approaching.  The first time this happens you'll still be figuring out how far to spread your resource collection, which quests to complete, and so forth.  And speaking of quests, this game has them.  They're largely tutorial-esque, which is quite welcome. 

For example, your first quest is to chop down a tree.  Then you get a quest to build a club, which unlocks a quest to build a torch, and so on.  Every single item you can build has a quest attached to it, and this is good because the only way to get more dwarves at the moment is to level up.  Everything you do gives exp, from chopping a tree to chopping a different tree.  Get enough exp and you level, which means +1 dwarf and usually some other crap you don't care about.  It is extraordinarily important to level as fast as possible at the beginning so you can get more dwarves.

The game's main flaw is not telling you vital information while holding your hand on trivial stuff.  It's like yeah, I know how to dig a tunnel, thanks.  But the Portal, perhaps the most useful ability in the game, is never mentioned.  Seriously.  Use Portal.  I'm sure this is just an early build kind of thing, but I'm reviewing an early build so that's what I'm gonna mention.  DEAL WITH IT.

Contraption after contraption after contraption.  And all of them work!

Despite its flaws, Craft The World is essentially Dwarf Fortress but doesn't go out of its way to be an unplayable mess.  I'd honestly consider it nearly worthy of release but the creators don't.  This bodes quite well for the future.  It's even got extremely well-done touchscreen support.  I was surprised when I tried pinching to zoom just for the hell of it and it actually worked.  I don't even use my mouse to play, opting instead for touch with WASD to scroll.  This game would be extremely welcome on a tablet, although a phone would simply be too small to do anything I think.

In conclusion, game is purchase good for money dollar.