Core Keeper is an exciting mash-up of Terraria and Minecraft. A sandbox adventure, it mixes farming, exploration, and open-world building in a pixel art top-down world. Featuring a compelling story, unique areas, and epic bosses to face down, it offers hours of content for those wanting a different mining experience.
Core Keeper offers tons of content with over 10 different biomes to explore, each with their own specific resources and enemies. Just getting through the main storyline and defeating the nine different bosses can take upwards of 30 hours. That doesn’t include completing collections, taking on side bosses, building a creative base, or adventuring through the endgame biome, The Passage. For players who want a game that has plenty of bang for the buck, Core Keeper is a solid title.
The biomes themselves differ from one another, from the fiery Molten Quarry to the open water of the Sunken Sea. Your character will start in the dirt biome, but quickly expand into the Clay Caves with the Larva Hive and the Forgotten Ruins. From there, even more variety is found as you travel through a lush jungle, hit the sands with the beach, and mine through rock walls to find the scorching desert. Within the areas are different monsters, vegetation, and ore formations.
The story itself is an interesting one and is a fun play on Alice falling down the rabbit hole. You end up underground and are looking for a way out. This underground is closer to what you’d find in Journey to the Center of the Earth, versus an actual cave system. First, you need to power the mysterious Core that you appear near, then vanquish more bosses to help the Core out. The ending has quite a twist, and without spoiling, is definitely worth hunting down all the souls.
The way bosses are found in the game makes the combat experience more rewarding. You need to farm resources to attract most of the creatures to a specific location or along a path they regularly travel. That doesn’t mean you won’t see them flying above you or swimming below your boat. It does mean you'll need to farm monsters to call the bosses, even when their shadow follows you. It also means you can defeat them multiple times if you want to challenge yourself or run out of their unique loot.
All elements of the title are enhanced with the ambient music and sounds that are present as you explore. Popping bubbles on the beach, squelching when facing slimes, and roaring when hitting a boss all add to the immersion. The music tracks are calming and chilling, depending on where you are, and aid in bringing the game to life.
Like all sandbox games, the main downfall of Core Keeper is you can end up grinding for resources, especially towards the endgame. Mining for ore, farming specific monsters, and even getting to the areas you want to reach, can add significant time to your playthrough. If you’re someone that doesn’t like grinding or doing the same actions for a length of time, you still want to check out Core Keeper, but should look into various guides to get those items efficiently.
While there may be some repetition and grinding, the game itself is extremely replayable. This is especially the case with the inclusion of world seed and difficulty editing. You can create an easier world for your solo game, but an extremely hard world for playing with friends. You can increase the resources, reduce the possibility of grinding, or decrease certain game aspects you dislike. The customization really brings Core Keeper to the next level when it comes to investing in a game you can continuously play.
Core Keeper Review | Final Thoughts
Overall, Core Keeper is a solid mining sandbox game with some survival mechanics mixed in. It has hours of content to explore, multiple bosses to fight, and an interesting storyline to pull you along. There’s endless creativity on display and it’s worth every penny.
Whether you’re looking for a new game to dive into for long gaming sessions or want something that’s easy to pick up and put down, Core Keeper is the title for you.
Core Keeperwas reviewed on PC via Steam with a copy provided by the developers over the course of 39 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.
