Crafty Survivors

On the surface the game is an interesting take on horde survivors. The different characters have unique playstyles and it can be quite a bit of fun. However the game doesn't seem to be that well thought out, in some cases it seems like stuff was thrown in because it sounds good, but not very well tested how they work when actually played out. An example would be one skill that forces your character to stand still for 2 seconds only to gain a buff that guarantees the next hit to be critical. In a game like this, unless you have a suitable build, standing still is a death sentence and the character with that skill is one designed from the ground up to be mobile and that is beside the point of the pathetic payout you get for that. Another issue to me is that skills are not autocast by default and some skills are definitely meant to be used manually, this is in my opinion counterproductive in a game like this. You have to keep track of your own character and a ton of enemies and their attacks, having to keep track of your skills at the same time is rather taxing. There is a reason why in other horde survivors skills are usually autocast and even aiming is often done automatically. It's one reason why I tried to play the lumberjack only once. Charging his skills, keeping track of the enemies and the stupid companion that might very well be on the other side of the map, it was for me unplayable. Also the charging of his main attack seemed bugged, I often had to push the button twice before he started to charge up. Also the charge was lost when I leveled up. The game is also stingy with information. Unlike other games like this, where level up for skills usually only affect stuff like cooldown, damage, range, etc, the skills here sometimes get additional effects. It would be nice to be able to look up the skills and the evolutions somewhere. Also what is really counterintuitive is that some of the resource items double as healing. If it's mentioned somewhere I didn't notice it and since enemies drop hearts as healing, I did not expect acorns or mushrooms being also healing items was rather counterintuitive. The help menu seems to only be available in the character select screen, which is honestly stupid, because it barely has any information that would be relevant to only the character selection. Balance is a bit of a mess, to the point where at least to me it seems almost like the higher difficulties are actually easier than the lower ones. With the increased number of enemies you get more level ups, once you get a build going the increased health of the enemies doesn't matter too much anymore. The damage of the enemies is the same, regardless of the difficulty and due to an increase in material gain you actually have more healing on higher difficulties. You might be a bit more likely to get hit, but you actually have it easier to recover from the hits you do get. You get passive stat boosts by building the town, the resources for that come from the various stages, so far I didn't really had a problem with a lack of resources, but it might get grindy eventually. Overall the game can be fun, but I think the developers really need to put in some more work before I would consider recommending it to anyone.

It's not bad and somewhat creative. The grind for meta progression didn't seem too bad either in the time I played. I do not recommend and are refunding it because of a major issue; playing with a controller is impossible at the moment. The movement controls (left stick) sort of freeze and the character keeps moving after stopping or changing direction. You can see how this is detrimental to success in a game where you have to constantly avoid enemies. I did my due diligence to rule out my hardware by trying the following (same conclusion for all): 6 Controllers - Steam Deck OLED, Rog Ally X, Ps5, Gulikit KK3 and KK3 Max Pro (bluetooth and dongle), Wii U with dongle 3 Operating Systems - Windows, Bazzite, Steam OS 4 Devices/PC's - Laptop, Desktop, Steam Deck OLED, ROG Ally X Disabling and Enabling Steam Input (no change, issue persists) Fix your game please, there seem to be others with the same issue. I am going to refund and throw on my wishlist to check back in after a while. The game was in early access for a min as I understand, so there should be no excuses. Shame.

the movement controls sometimes don't register and it frequently leads you into a direction you didn't want to go. This causes so much unnecessary damage that I can't even fathom playing it for that alone. It might get fixed in the future but I'm done.

At a first look, it seems solid. But it really doesn't respect your time. Everything is drawn out way too long for no good reason, having to go through 8 different levels with thousands of monsters dragging on and on. For one single item, to upgrade one building, for a 1% increase or whatever. Don't buy it, I fell into the trap of thinking others were just complaining. As a rougelike-ish it's horrendous.

I liked the creativity of the abilities and personalities of the characters in the game. The game is a survivor style which is great to have a chill time. I think is challenging enough to get hooked. like the graphics and everything has a good visibility easy to recognize enemy damage from attack to monsters.

I have not played enough hours to verify if claims of the game being too "grindy" is true. However, as of the time of writing this there is a glaring issue that prevents me from playing. Sometimes the game will drop an input causing me to go the wrong way for 0.5 seconds or so. Due to how many enemies there are on screen, this has often caused a run ending mistake. It does not happen all the time, but it does happen often enough to be noticeable and frustrating enough for me to drop the game.

The more classes I unlocked the more I realized that they were essentially more complicated but not necessarily more interesting/powerful. I really liked the idea of the blacksmith for example, but his whole repairing and forging mechanic felt like a drag when other characters had much more fluid and interesting mechanics. I could say the same about the farmer, if you end up picking the corn gatling gun, you see that it is essentially a worse version of the other weapons. The village upgrades are pretty grindy, and at times the rewards can feel minor. I want to like this game, but the more i played the more I found myself wanting for more meaningful enemies or stage encounters. One big gripe I have about the combat is that enemies kind of spawn pretty slowly and the levels end up taking a long time to complete. The loop then becomes: run around avoiding enemies that want to hit you at the start, get a few upgrades to wave clear, wait for enemy counter to slowly tick down so you can fight the stage boss. With the layout of the levels essentially being the same square every time, and the basic enemies always sharing the same behavior, it gets really repetitive. This game almost feels like it gets things right, but the replay value isn't there for me.

As someone who has played this game from very early access, I just CANNOT recommend it to new players, not in its current state. This review is from the perspective of playing exclusively on the hardest difficulty (which some people claim is meant to be poorly designed), having played every single character multiple times, and nearly having 100% achievement completion. Issue #1: Starting with the biggest issue first: BUGS. Just mountains and mountains of bugs that have existed since early stages of development that for whatever reason the creators still refuse to fix. I was willing to overlook most of these during early access figuring the devs would eventually fix it, but these bugs are completely inexcusable in the final release of the game. Bosses spawning outside of the map, forcing you to restart a 40-50 minute play through. Creatures infinitely spawning experience locking you into a level up screen until the game eventually crashes from too many items spawning. Assets not despawning properly resulting in massive lag. Massive lag caused by poor optimization and bad design decisions, biggest culprits being Mausolea or jewlia who will both result in your game running at 1 FPS until their abilities end. Being hit by invisible attacks or attacks that just didn't load in properly. Charging enemies are supposed to have an indicator of what direction they are going, except when they randomly change their charge distance, some will charge clear off screen, others will move 2 feet and immediately change direction to hit you, some will charge in a completely different direction from the indicator. Issue #2: game balance. It's bad. I'm not talking about how some characters are harder than others, I mean that some characters are not just harder to play, but so incredibly weak as to be a chore to play (lumberjack, builder, alchemist), these characters have poorly designed kits, low damage, and extremely limited playstyle. This has been an issue the players have raised for a very long time, and the devs had multiple opportunities to fix it with various changes they made to the game, instead they just left those characters to rot. This leads into the next issue Issue 3: A survivor game that tried to be a bullet hell (and failed). From the early levels and characters the game was obviously going for the typical survivor like playstyle, fight waves of enemies that run at you until you become strong enough to demolish everything and eventually fight a boss. Later stages this design choice completely changed to being a bullet hell where enemies will launch dozens of projectiles at you, enemies will charge at you from off screen, enemies will lurk just off screen to get a cheap shot on you when you move too close, some enemies will straight up attack you from across the entire map forcing you to run around trying to figure out where they are. This problem is made all the worse by the character kits. Many characters are designed with a survivor gameplay in mind (standing still or staying in a limited area using turret style skills, extremely limited dodging ability, and skills that slow you down), but being forced to run around the map means these characters are just too annoying to play. Issue 4: lack of planning by the developers. One of the main features of Crafty Survivors is the town building aspect, where upgrading buildings will provide you with buffs. Some buildings will even provide new and interesting ways to change your playstyle. Sounds great right? The issue? They don't work with character kits. I'll use Stoverick the chef as an example, as he is one of the first characters you will play as. One of the buildings provides potions that give new abilities to select when a character levels up. But they don't interact with the character kits at all. One potion lets you throw beehives, stoverick gains stacks for his ultimate attack when he kills enemies that have been marked by his other skills, but the potion abilities don't apply these marks, meaning no stacks for his strongest attack, so there is ZERO reason to ever pick these abilities. This gets even worse with characters like the alchemist and jeweler that have to combo their skills, so choosing these extra abilities end up being a complete waste because it breaks the entire kit and uses up valuable weapon slots, or forces you to use up your limited banish ability to remove these worthless abilities from the selection pool. Next we have the skill trees, each character can get 20 points to allocate to their skill tree to change their playstyle slightly, Some characters like the farmer get a whole complicated tree to customize your playstyle with her, others like the builder get a very linear path that forces you to play them in one specific way. Others like Sewvia get a skill tree that doesn't interact with her kit in any meaningful way and merely changes her basic attacks. Remember those potions that give you new abilities I mentioned earlier? Yeah this is another reason they're complete garbage. Issue #5: personal views of the game. This section is largely my own personal issues with game design choices, some people will likely disagree. skill opacity is useless when player abilities are layered over enemies. Even playing with 30 opacity on my skills I frequently cannot see attacks or enemies underneath the dozens of effects my character is throwing around, and god forbid I use an ability that creates a gas cloud because the enemy gas clouds are THE EXACT SOME COLOR making them invisible. Aggressive field materials shouldn't be minibosses! These enemies have the most obnoxious abilities combined with 4-5x the health of a standard enemy. Undodgeable attacks shouldn't exist in this type of game, this goes back to the bullet hell change, but multiple later stage bosses were given large screen covering abilities that cannot be blocked or dodged, you just have to try and get to the safe zone and hope your dash doesn't launch you too far. All of this is why even with hundreds of hours into this game, I just cannot recommend what it has become. What started as a unique and very enjoyable survivor-like has become an unrecognizable wannabe bullet-hell riddled with bugs, questionable design choices, and poor game balance.