Developer: Preferred Networks
Publisher: Preferred Networks
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Omega Crafter – Preview
With the recent release of big hitters such as Palworld, Enshrouded, and Smalland, it seems that the survival genre is more alive than ever. While the aforementioned games may be very different in appearance, they all share the same foundation where you find yourself starting with next to nothing to build up a hustling and bustling base or city eventually. These games vary in terms of their shtick and the newest contender, Omega Crafter, is also a title that wants to add something new to the mix. This time, you’ll be commanding small robots that can be programmed to do all the heavy lifting in your city.
Omega Crafter is an open-world survival game with many of the familiar mechanics of the genre, and cartoony visuals. There’s no real story to speak of when you boot up the game, and you’ll be taken to a very simplistic character creation screen after you choose to start playing. The options are extremely limited here, so we do hope some additional customization features are added in the future. In-game, everything looks decent, albeit a bit rough around the edges and somewhat simplistic. Even so, you’ll be dropped into a colorful world that has a few different zones you can explore. The world itself feels a bit empty in the Early Access version and even the small dungeons are a bit bland. The enemy variety is fairly limited and stronger enemy types are simple recolored versions of their normal counterparts. Combat and everything else works somewhat as expected, but we do advise playing the game with a mouse and keyboard setup as controller support is very limited at the moment.
As you progress, there are in fact two different types of experience to keep track of. You’ll have the experience you get for performing tasks and killing monsters, but you’ll also have the World Level. The first is straightforward, and as you gain enough experience to level up, you’ll be able to assign skill points for yourself and your Gammi, which is your own personal robot helper. You can invest in better stamina recovery, more health, increased damage, and better defense, and you can do the same for your Gammi. The World Level can be upped by throwing items into the Data Analyzer, which needs a specific number of ‘Bits’ to get you to a higher World Level. More rare items will fetch more Bits than, for example, some berries or mushrooms would. It’s all a fairly straightforward process.
The game’s unique feature, however, is the fact that you can program the Gammis you can summon in your town. The programming doesn’t involve too much actual code, instead, it will revolve around simple conditions and a lot of preprogrammed lines of commands. You can, for example, command a Gammi to chop down trees, which is already a fairly big help when you require lumber. You can take it further by making your Gammi also pick up the chopped lumber and having it place the materials in a chest. Furthermore, you can do this for all sorts of other tasks too, such as crafting, mining, and so on. We wished the chest options were a bit more expansive from the start, as the storage room is very limited. That being said, the programming itself is easy to get the hang of, and each Gammi has three different tabs you can fill with code, so you can even have them swap tasks on the fly. It’s easy to ruin their logical loop, however, if you interfere with any of their tasks. This will cause the Gammi in question to fail at its task and possibly ruin the overall programming loop.
Even though we enjoyed the overall gameplay loop by going out to battle monsters, upgrade our city with the spoils, and program our Gammis to do the heavy lifting, the game simply doesn’t really have that much content at this point. You could idle for the most part, letting the Gammis do all the different tasks, to then just cram items in the Data Analyzer to keep leveling up the World Level. By doing so, you’ll unlock new items, and eventually, you’ll just have to head out to grind a bit, kill a world boss or two, and repeat the process until you unlock the next items and the next world boss. We do hope the world gets fleshed out a bit more, otherwise you’ll play (or idle) through everything Omega Crafter has to offer very quickly.
Conclusion
Omega Crafter is a fun open-world experience, and it’s very interesting to commit yourself to programming a fully functional and automated city with your army of Gammis. We were quite invested in the programming portion of the title, as the combat felt a bit basic, and the world felt a bit empty. We find that there currently isn’t that much content to actively play this title for hours on end. This is the ideal idling title, however, as you can sit back and see how your Gammis complete task after task.
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