Craftlings Hands-on Preview – Terraria Meets Lemmings With Laid-Back Style
[summaraize]
Indie games publisher Raw Fury had a handful of upcoming games for MP1st to check out earlier this month. One of those was the charming Lemmings-meets-Terraria game named Craftlings, the debut effort from Ariano Games. We took this upcoming game for a spin, and have our preview ready below.
Nostalgic, Yet New
Style wise, Craftlings immediately will remind older gamers of Lemmings. Adorably stupid creatures, Lemmings would walk at a nearly constant pace, and it was up to you the player to stop them from, say, walking off a cliff to their death. Thankfully, I didn’t see any of the Craftlings doing that. I DID, however, see one grab a stick of dynamite and promptly blow themselves up, so they definitely still need some guidance.
This art style and use of pretty low-spec visual effects means Craftlings should run on just about any computer you have lying around – even the recommended specs simply say all you need is a 2.4 GHz dual core CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and 512 MB of graphics memory, on a GeForce 8600/Radeon HD 4600 or higher. Basically, if you have a computer that was built in the last 15 years, if not longer ago, you should be able to play Craftlings without much hassle.
Some Bumps Expected
That isn’t to say there’s not a lot going on with Craftlings. Besides giving them safe paths to walk, Craftlings must also be given the proper jobs if their town is to collect the right resources. Collecting wood is usually the first order of business, which can be used to create buildings. These buildings can in turn produce other resources, such as pickaxes for the Craftlings to use for mining. Mined resources can be turned in and used to build more advanced buildings, resulting in other resources being created. Repeat this until you can arm some Craftlings with weapons, with which they can defend their homes from skeleton warriors, giant sea creatures, and more things we didn’t get to see during our short time with the game.
Indeed, there does appear to be a lot of moving pieces under the hood, as during our demo, the quest I was on glitched, and a new building that was supposed to be able to be chosen never materialized. We simply had to move along to the next portion of the demo. It’s not uncommon to see bugs like this while playing a preview build of the game, and no doubt such things will get ironed out before the game’s release later this year.
Arriving Later This Year
Earlier this year, however, a free demo of Craftlings was briefly made available on Steam. While it’s now too late to experience that, when it was running, some challenge maps were released. These were timed, no-save maps which tasked players with performing certain tasks, such as crafting as many snowmen as possible, which would blast off into space because why not? This also shows us that the world of Craftlings has different types of biomes, and atypical resources which might have unexpected effects on the world around them. Hopefully this is only a peek at the various surprises and delights developer Ariano Games has planned for their players.
Craftlings looks to bring a mixture of laid-back resource management, with some occasional scuffling, and hilariously nearly-mindless minions to control. It feels reminiscent, while bringing in some modern mechanics that retro games would’ve only dreamed of achieving way back when. Look out for Craftlings when it arrives on PC later this year.
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