Crafting mechanics are ubiquitous to many games these days, and some, like Minecraft, are built around them. However, some games want the crafting to be both central to the game and have a relevant story purpose. With that in mind, Craftopia attempts to have it both ways and mostly succeeds.

The main story begins with your character hitting a button and Earth evidently being destroyed. The next scene has a mysterious being tell you that yes, you caused Earth to die, but a god named Krael is willing to give you another chance to not unalive a planet. His only command is to create, and after this, you are dropped into a wide world to do just that.

The story is nowhere near very complicated, and the basic gameplay loop is a mix of Action RPG and Sandbox. The Action RPG side involves exploring dungeons, fighting monsters, discovering treasures, and interacting with various NPCs. The Sandbox side involves doing a lot of crafting. Not just better equipment, but to gain levels and new recipes, you will have to make various items for quest givers to open up the world further.

The fun part is that this game has a lot of wild and crazy features. You can unlock schizo-tech, so you can shoot goblins with machine guns and make your way over fantasy plains on a sweet motorcycle. As you further unlock crafting recipes, your tech choices get even more wild. There is a vague goal of finding a secret at the heart of the world, but aside from that, the goal is to create stuff, find more to create, and repeat.

If this sounds a bit repetitive, it kinda is, but this title does liven things up with an ever-expanding list of insane tech to make exploring and combat more and more interesting. If you want a game with even more structured goals than this, though, then this is going to get boring fast.

Graphically, this title uses a colorful, high fantasy, cel-shaded style. While this generally works well, it's a bit of tone whiplash with the more modern technology you can have like hoverboards and motorcycles in what is otherwise an early medieval high fantasy-style setting. Then again, the schizo-tech is part of the charm. Some animation is a bit stiff in places, but all the essential animations work fine enough.

Sounds and music again trend into high fantasy. Music is a bit minimalistic, with mostly simple tunes with some flute and synth but little else. Given the sandbox feel they are going for, this title took a page from Minecraft's book and opted for minimal distractions in the music department, and I can't fault that.

This game has both keyboard and mouse control and Steam-supported controller support. Of the two, I recommend the keyboard; controllers don't seem to be fully supported in all areas, even with the remapping of keys.

Stability is generally solid. Craftopia runs natively on Microsoft Windows and is rated as Playable on the Steam Deck. Linux players can use Steam Proton to make it run out of the box. Modding is supported, but this could degrade stability. Multiplayer works either locally or with online players, though it is somewhat more prone to instability.

Morally, Craftopia has a few elements that are concerning.

Violence is done action RPG style. You can attack and kill basically anything, including friendly NPCs. There is no blood or gore, and most to all NPCs will respawn after about a day.

Language can get a bit earthy. You will see some harsh language up to b***h from some NPC dialogue. There are some fan mods to censor this, but the actual game has no such censorship option. There is no crude sexual innuendo, though.

The game uses Type 1/2 for body types, but considering the player is never referred to as male or female and male/female features are interchangeable, this renders any changes to the avatar cosmetic. You will start off with a fair bit of skin exposed before you get some better outfits, but nothing worse than female midriffs are exposed.

The game world has a generic polytheist religion of sorts. The top deity, Krael, is apparently the head god of the setting, though there are some other deity-like beings. Aside from Krael's command to you to build and create, the religious aspects of the game are not defined. This setting is that of a typical high fantasy with mages and undead enemies.

Morally, this is one big sandbox. The overall goal is your own personal survival. There is very little in the way of organized authority or government.

Overall, Craftopia is a simple yet fun action RPG sandbox game. Technically, it runs well. Morally, aside from the violence and language concerns, this title can be handled more than by any reasonably mature teenager. If you need an action RPG with a lot of crafting to do, this is a pretty good game for that purpose.