Omega Crafter Preview

Omega Crafter, released on Steam Early Access on the 29th of March, is an open-world survival automation game available in both multiplayer and single-player. The main point of it is the little helpers you have, called Grammis, which you can program to do whatever tasks you’re looking to automate.

There isn’t much of a story that can be gleaned from just playing as of yet, and the primary focus of Omega Crafter is its innovative gameplay. It does have a little bit of a setting, though — the game world is being attacked by a foul program, and you need to defeat the bosses in order to deal with it and have the game released in time. It’s an interesting and very creative idea to have the product be part of its own story, but sadly, the narrative doesn’t have much of a spotlight while playing.

The gameplay is the main focus in Omega Crafter: there’s a basic combat mechanic, which isn’t anything special but works well enough and is fun on its own, but the innovative part is what makes it really exciting. You have (adorable) little robots that you can program to do a plethora of tasks. Almost anything you might want to do can be automated, and the way it works isn’t that far off from actual coding. While the way it functions in the game isn’t exactly C# programming, the logic behind it isn’t that different from the logic in real coding; it’s just a lot simpler. It can also be played by someone who doesn’t know anything about programming, though, as there are templates that can be used to gain a basic understanding of the logic behind it.

There’s also a tutorial present in the game, but it’s not the best. It’s all in text, and there’s a lot of it, not everyone is a fan of reading for about 20 minutes out of the first hour of gameplay. And although it’s verbose, sometimes the tutorial can be very vague, and understanding how exactly things work isn’t the easiest. For example, there’s a main robot that is tied to you, called your Buddy, but you can program it to do anything just like the rest… except it only works if you’re near what it needs to complete its tasks. It doesn’t run off on its own to do what you tell it to, so if you tell it to chop trees unless you’re standing near some, it won’t do anything. This mechanic is never explained and I had to figure it out on my own, which took longer than I’d like to admit.

The game’s visuals are pretty simple 3D models and textures — it’s not unpleasant to look at in the slightest, but during the night, things can look a little weird; especially as your Buddy can look absolutely terrifying if it’s standing in the dark from a little far away. Some things are pretty low-poly, but it fits in with the theme, so it doesn’t feel out of place. I can’t say that Omega Crafter looks particularly good, but it doesn’t look bad either, and it might improve at some point.

The background music depends on the current thing happening: it’s different during combat and while you are building. While some of the tracks can be a little bit similar to each other, they are pretty nice to listen to, so the music is pretty good, with the only issue being repetitiveness. As for sound effects, these are pretty well done and high quality and the developers did great regarding them.

There are some issues with the current state of the game, though, mostly due to the lack of content present right now. There aren’t a lot of things to do after spending a couple of hours in Omega Crafter, and while it is still in Early Access, £20.99 is a little expensive for what you’re getting right now.

Overall, Omega Crafter is pretty promising, though, and once some of the issues are fixed and new content is added, it could be a really good experience. I’m hoping that in the future, it will be improved and changed for the better, which can result in a pretty unique and fun experience.