Omega Crafter is a newly released open-world survival game developed by Preferred Networks, a technology company based in Japan. This is Preferred Network’s first game release, so if you don’t recognise the name, you’re not alone.
Omega Crafter serves as an introduction to basic programming in the form of Grammi, miniature robots that you as the player can program to do various tasks around your city. Whether it be crafting arrows, cooking meat or tending to crops, Grammi are an essential part of building up your city. It’s as clear as day that Preferred Networks have spent a lot of effort focusing on making Grammis as intuitive and easy to learn as possible, even for someone with no programming experience.
Despite being easy to set up and learn, the sense of achievement after setting up tasks successfully is massive. Even something as simple as setting up a Grammi to take raw meat out of a chest, cook it at a campfire and put it back into another chest is such an absolute blast to figure out and see work in action. And this is another feature that Omega Crafter does so well. Just by looking at the Grammi as they do their task, it’s easy to see where errors are occurring with their programming and where slight tweaks need to be made.
One major part of Omega Crafters is exploring the open-world environment around you, each world is randomly generated so there is always new terrain to traverse and new structures to discover. Whether it’s the looming black towers of the Meadows of New Beginnings, or the Goblin camps in the Endless Wilds, you won’t find yourself losing interest out in the wilderness. For those who enjoy a challenge, dotted around the world are dungeons filled with dangerous enemies, as well as random bosses for you to tackle alongside your personal Grammi. However, one thing must be said about the combat in this game:
The combat system as it stands, is unexpectedly harsh on you.
Even whilst playing on ‘normal’, I personally found that despite the game encouraging you to take down the first of the area bosses, the tutorial does not leave you well-equipped enough to defeat this boss. You may find yourself having to spend extra time grinding materials in order to get the bare minimum of equipment needed for even just the first boss. With each new area, the difficulty dramatically ramps up, leaving you almost constantly needing to look for upgrades to your equipment.
And if you do make an attempt at a fight that you’re woefully unprepared for, upon death you will lose most of your materials (excluding food and tools/weapons), which may leave you feeling frustrated. The one saving grace, however, is the tombstone system which allows you to fully recover everything you lost with no timer attached. But with a lack of quick travel, it’s not uncommon to find yourself making a 10+ minute trek back to the site of your death.
But despite this, much like the Grammi system, once you’ve mastered combat, it is immensely satisfying to partake in. Using a mixture of swords, bows & arrows, shields and dodge rolling, you’re sure to find yourself getting a real thrill from each boss you defeat. And with the promise of loot at the end of each encounter, it’s more than worth your time to tackle each enemy head on.
As the game currently stands in early access, the lack of a backstory and multiple gameplay features is evident after just a couple of hours of gameplay, which may lead you to start to wonder “what’s next?”. However, the gameplay features that are already in the game are well-developed and have evidently had a lot of effort put into them to make each aspect flow seamlessly with each other.
With the promise of new content coming before the game is fully released, Omega Crafter is certainly a game worth your time. With the ability to already play with friends remotely, you’re sure to have a good time expanding your city and tackling the environmental bosses together.
Omega Crafter is available on Windows PC and Mac through Steam Early Access.
