SPACE Craft

SPACE Craft is a 2D retro pixel platformer with extremely lightweight survival elements. Land on a planet and do basic platforming/gathering stuff. The quality here is extremely low as the screenshots show. They chose to use obsolete retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. Gameplay is shallow despite the survival mechanics and unsatisfying. It's not possible to recommend this.

This is not necessarily a bad game, but it's difficult to recommend due to the low quality and lack of care. There is a single music track, and all sound effects repeat and are reused all over, so you're better off just disabling the sound. The crafting and survival component is pretty slow and tedious, serving more as a padding mechanic than anything difficult, and since it's not persistent, all of your resources, health, temperature, and location all reset at the end of each 'chapter' (A very short gameplay segment consisting of a single objective.), so it's hard to get fixated on the crafting or survival since you only need to worry about it about once a chapter before the reset. Movement, for a platformer, is very clunky, with massive hitboxes and non-instant results when you jump or use tools. Enemies move very slightly slower than you, making kiting or any kind of tactics very difficult, and every level has several asteroids that if you touch them, instantly kills you, restarting the chapter, which can be a 5-10 minute loss of progress. The narrative and writing, which seems to be the focus, is quite poor, with some structural errors in the text and a lack of detail or inv…

Do not buy this. I'm no stranger to these dollar games. Usually they're stinkers, but every now and then you get one that is legitimately fun. You go into it expecting extraordinary levels of jank so you have to be prepared to be very forgiving. The music? Meh. The "wind" audio overlay gets old. The controls are next level jank. The HUD indicators leave some to be desired. You spend a lot of time trying to not only figure out the game, but also how the developer thinks, because it is fairly un-intuitive at first. All of this I can forgive for a dollar game. In fact I find the game itself quite charming. If the developer spent some time polishing it, this could be a legitimate ten dollar game. But what I can't forgive, and why I opened with "do not buy this" is because it's simply broken. After spending considerable time learning the enemies, learning the HUD, learning how to stay alive, and even watching the temp gauge, you still just die for no reason (and have to redo what you've already done). Bugged? Maybe. Deliberate? Maybe. Likelihood this will ever get fixed? Doubtful. Either the developer made this for a school project and then threw it up on Steam to see if they could…