Tinkerlands Preview

Developers CodeManu and Endless Coffee are brewing something special with publisher HypeTrain Digital! I just tried out the demo for Tinkerlands — an upcoming co-op sandbox game about exploration, crafting, and fighting — and I could not be more excited! Let's talk about my experiences a bit.

I didn't even notice while playing, but it has no tutorial — you just wake up after a shipwreck and get asked to please find the captain. There are a few tools in a box, and then… Well, then you go off and do whatever you want. I didn't manage to find the captain in my 40-minute session, as I didn't want to spoil the gameplay too much once my heart was set on getting the game, but I did get to build a house, explore a whole lot, and fight a ton of stuff.

First, I'd like to touch on one of my favourite things to see in games: tons of quality-of-life features! In the bar at the bottom, there are a total of 10 items/tools you can have there, but you only need to use from 1-5 on the keyboard (or scroll five times), as each two items count as one "selected", and you use the first or second one by left- or right-clicking with the mouse. This is great because you won't find yourself scrolling in terror or fumbling to click the right number when you're in a bind! So I don't flood the preview with me gawking at the quality-of-life mechanics, some other of the features I thoroughly enjoyed were the huge inventory space and the HUD (it's super easy to comprehend).

This ease of gameplay extends to fighting and building: despite the fixed perspective, it was intuitive for me to fight and dodge enemies very easily, and when I built a house, it took me mere seconds to complete everything. For those who are of the anxious brand, like me, don't worry — if you misplace an item, you can just pickaxe it until you've got it back!

But enough of the smooth experience: let's talk about the adventuring. The island in Tinkerlands is bursting at the seams with stuff to collect, from trees and stones to shells and bones. It was hard to stay focused on a task because I wanted to run around clearing and collecting everything, and the phenomenal hitting animations (really, the animations in general) were so satisfying it only made it harder not to.

Whenever I wasn't stopping myself from hoarding criminal amounts of wood and stone, I found a few NPCs around; one of them wanted me to build him a house, though I never figured out how, and the other(s? I'm not sure if it was the same old man) was a salesman. According to the Steam page, we'll be able to build a town, and considering how easy and fun it was, I can't wait to try it!

Yet another fantastic feature was how easily I went from having nothing to having a ton of different tools and crafting stations to play around with. As someone who plays a LOT of survival titles, I expected to be stuck with the noobie items for a while, but in the blink of an eye, I had a stone axe and pickaxe, a sawmill, an iron, and a furnace! This was quite exciting.

Tinkerlands has an incredible amount of potential — I would've happily just played until the end of the game, and it was just the demo. I can't wait to play it with my wife, go out exploring, and build a beautiful town! I really have no complaints to mention except one tiiiiny niggle: I hate that the character walks slowly when going to the sides but quicker when walking at an angle.

If you enjoy adventuring, fighting bosses, and crafting, I highly recommend checking out Tinkerlands! Unfortunately, there's no release date yet, but you can bet I'll be there when it gets announced.