Core Keeper

Core Keeper is a newer game I picked up because it got pretty decently popular at launch and in general received good feedback about being like 50% Terraria with a bunch of ideas from other great games mixed in, and because I finally figured out a way for my friends to get to play it.

As mentioned, Core Keeper definitely takes the most inspiration from Terraria, but is top-down instead of side-scrolling. It is a sort of survival crafting game, where you find higher and higher tiers of resources in the world and use them to craft better and better equipment and tools that let you tackle harder and harder challenges. It looks great, the combat is pretty fun, and there's a lot of content with several tiers of bosses and optional minibosses. Progression happens both through getting better gear, as well as leveling up your skills by using them and further specializing through a mini skill tree for each skill. About half the skills are for different combat styles, and the others are for mining, fishing, farming, cooking, etc. It starts off great, and on paper it is great, but the more I play it, the more I find things that annoy me.

I think the first thing that stuck out to me was how little this game cares for the environment and what you've built. To a degree, this is also true in Terraria, with end-game tools prioritizing reckless mining, leaving huge holes everywhere, it's much worse here. Many enemies and your attacks may destroy terrain. While this is immersive in terms of combat and seeing enemies tunneling along, it really sucks when enemies find their way into your base and destroy everything you've built and all your neatly organized chests, and also leaves the world rather ugly elsewhere with there just being progressively fewer and fewer walls to be found anywhere.
Secondly, I think this commits the same sin as many other survival games that want to have decoration options. It lets you find those decorations out in the world instead of letting you craft them. It's fine for rare decorations, but my inventory instantly gets full with all this junk as I explore. If I want to enjoy exploration, I have to delete all of it, leaving me with nothing to decorate my base with. If I bring it all with me, I also have to have tens and tens of chests just for these decorations. Aside from decorations, far too many other items are also found through drops, and in general inventory space and managing where everything goes is not thought through and a terrible experience.
And finally, just in general, Core Keeper tries to do too much. It picks these little mechanics from different games but fails to incorporate them properly into the core gameplay. There is automated mining and conveyor belts, but not enough tools to actually automate doing anything else. Farming works for plants, but there isn't much to do with them, because the other half of the food or potions you can make with them requires too much work from random fish drops or seeking out certain enemies. NPC housing is terribly undercooked, with no indication on how it even works, and you can just chuck them all into a single room with 10 beds in it. And there's many more cases like it.

I just think Core Keeper bit off more than it could chew and released without polishing all of its mechanics and how they influence each other. And I don't think it will ever get around to polishing everything. If you just want another Terraria that's pretty much worse in every single aspect, Core Keeper is still a fine game, because even at being only a fraction of what Terraria is, Terraria is just so good. I'll give it a partial recommendation, because fun can still be had with it, but honestly, I know I'm going to enjoy replaying Terraria for the 6th time more than I enjoyed playing this.