Omega Crafter takes an educational approach to autonomous survival crafting, giving players the ability to actually code the game they’re in to automate production and create a living city of workbots to handle building. While full of strong ideas and certainly an original entry in its genre, Omega Crafter can feel underwhelming when it comes to the basic mechanics that group it with similar titles. While you’re sure to find certain aspects of the game interesting, by the end of my playthrough, I was mostly thinking about other games that handle the “survival crafting” element much better, as the finished state of this Early Access title feels lacking.
Omega Crafter has one of the most unique stories I’ve seen in the genre. As the coder for a new video game, you notice things have begun to go wrong, and to solve the issue, you jump into the game yourself to fix them. Using your knowledge of code, you shape the world around you and defeat bosses that have slipped in and corrupted your game before they can do further damage.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the game uses the ability to code in its mechanics. To automate tasks, you are given control of little guys who gather resources and craft things using the supplies at your base. However, they only do so when ordered, and your only way of giving these commands is through code. This is the clever system Omega Crafter uses to teach you how to think and talk like a programmer.
Having your buddy constantly harvest local resources like wood and stone is a great convenience. Theoretically, it could turn the chore of gathering the basic survival necessities into a thoughtless automated process that continues while you explore the game, search for fights, or gather rare materials. Unfortunately, this feature is limited by the fact that your buddy has a very short range for these tasks. If you move away, the buddy’s actions are interrupted, leaving trees uncut and stones ungathered. This makes the process feel pointless unless you remain in your base and happen to have a large supply of nearby resources.
The buddies who work in your base are not much better. They are limited to gathering and crafting only within the city tiles. In the early game, you won’t make much use of them. Setting them up takes more time than crafting the items yourself, and you won’t have many materials that need automation at that point anyway.
Regardless of its limitations, the idea of using Omega Crafter as a means to load coding is really cool, and you can tell that this system was what inspired the developers to make the game in the first place. I think it would be cool if the coding had more to do with changing the world around you instead of just automating resource gathering, as we all know, a programmer physically inside of a game world would essentially be a god.
As interesting as a survival crafting game with a coding angle sounds, Omega Crafter unfortunately falls short in the areas the genre is known for. This makes it feel like a downgrade compared to other titles already on the market.
Building in the game is unimpressive. All structures use basic block-shaped pieces and must be placed on a grid tied to city tiles, meaning it’s very restricted. These tiles do not flatten the terrain, meaning that unless you find a perfect plateau, your city will often be floating or clipping into the environment. This same problem affects randomly generated resources like rocks, which often spawn with their undersides exposed.
Combat is also unexciting, being a very basic swing-block-roll system using the stats of gear and an RPG-like progression system. While I did enjoy the thrill of leveling up and the straightforward way you could upgrade your weapons with the use of materials, I didn’t enjoy that the progression was simple, invisible number increases to stats, or how combat often felt more like a chore than an exciting engagement. Enemies will often one-shot you too, with very little in the way of attack telegraphing on enemies, who also tend to hit harder and faster than you as well, with other enemies on the polar opposite end of things feeling way too easy. Even blocking, for some strange reason, takes away from your health bar, which will never get higher than 30 in the base game.
Combat is also not engaging. It uses a simple swing, block, and roll system based on gear stats and an RPG-like progression system. I did enjoy the excitement of leveling up and how easy it was to upgrade weapons with materials. However, I did not enjoy that progression came from invisible number increases, or that combat often felt like a chore. Some enemies can one-shot you with little telegraphing, and tend to hit harder and faster than you. Others are far too easy, there’s no happy medium. Even blocking, for some strange reason, takes away from your health bar, which will never get higher than 30 in the base game.
On top of everything else, the game’s world simply feels empty, and the half-pokemon, half-generic anime style leaves a lot to be desired. It isn’t unfair to feel as though many areas in Omega Crafter simply don’t have as much soul as others. Most notably, enemy designs in the game feel the most inspired, where the world itself and the gear can feel like it was pulled from a generic asset pack.
While they can still feel empty, the worlds start to become more interesting as you go on, to the game’s credit. One zone that I got to play that isn’t yet in the Early Access build features level, and meteor strikes kept me on my toes.
Omega Crafter is a title bursting with creativity and potential, especially in how it encourages players to interact with code as part of the core gameplay loop. Its educational ambition and quirky narrative premise stand out as bright spots in a sea of survival crafting games. However, its shortcomings in basic mechanics like combat, building, progression, and survival mechanics make it hard to recommend over more polished alternatives in the genre. With more development and refinement, it could evolve into something special, but as it stands, it feels more like an inspired prototype than a fully realized game.
The Final Word
Omega Crafter is full of creativity and potential, but unfortunately falls short on delivering many of the mechanics players have come to expect from the genre, making the game feel rather dated and unfinished in many areas, which overall outshines its interesting player-programming gimmick.
Try Hard Guides was provided a PC code for Omega Crafter. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on ourGame Reviewspage! Omega Crafter is available onSteam.
