Fans of Subnautica and Satisfactory will love this new mix of survival game and factory simulation, as you turn a barren world into a verdant paradise.
Open world sandbox games are an unusually broad genre. United by their large landmasses and the appearance of total freedom to roam, in actuality most are defined by the strict limits they place on players, forcing you to take care of your own survival before you can get stuck into loftier goals. For example, Subnautica and its sequels give you an undersea world to explore, but only a small amount of air to do it, making your initial forays into the deep, brief and nerve-racking.
Satisfactory’s gloriously pristine landscape looks inviting enough, until you discover the large number of creatures that want to kill you. Climbing the game’s tech tree gives you access to both weapons and the ability to run fast enough to beat a hasty retreat, as you transform an untouched paradise into a sprawling set of intricately engineered factory complexes, your indelible imprint on the world visible wherever you look.
The Planet Crafter inverts that approach. Instead of an untouched Eden, at the beginning of the game you find yourself on a hostile planet with only your one-man escape pod, surrounded by a desolate Martian style red desert. Beset by sandstorms and violent meteor showers, the airless, deep frozen environment will kill you if you stray too far from your tiny haven, your oxygen tank draining if you don’t swiftly return to safety.
Scattered around you are mineral deposits you can harvest and use for basic crafting. Clumps of ice can be turned into potable water, while the remains of ancient, crashed spaceships yield sealed packs of rations, helping keep thirst and hunger at bay while you start figuring out what to do. Having to hunt for resources, combined with your limited air supply and constant need to find food and water, adds tension to your attempts at exploration.
At least in The Planet Crafter it’s only the harsh environment that will kill you, the lifeless rock you’re stuck on incapable of supporting Satisfactory’s nightmarish giant spiders or Subnautica’s murderous leviathans. You will end up dying quite a bit at first though, losing precious inventory items when you do. They automatically get boxed up, waiting for you where you died, but with no map or compass to assist in finding them, rarely tend to be seen again – at least until you stumble across them later in the game, when their contents suddenly don’t seem as important.
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.
That’s because your interactions with the nameless planet feature an escalating drip feed of novel tech and equipment, gradually making you better suited to life in its expansive wastes. Longer lasting oxygen tanks, more inventory space, faster running speed, and soon enough a jetpack, start to make traversal more straightforward. This gives you more rapid access to the diverse biomes, many of which come with different crafting materials to further expand your reach and abilities.
Your goal in The Planet Crafter is terraforming; turning the bleakly infertile hellscape into something more welcoming. Starting with simple wind turbines and solar cells, you use your rudimentary power supply to fuel heaters that warm the surface, while drilling rigs release gas into the atmosphere, incrementally increasing air temperature and pressure, from an initial icy vacuum to something that might one day sustain life.
As you survive, slowly working with the emergent ecosystem, the first sign that your efforts are having an effect is when the sterile red skies turn blue. Keep at it and a few hours later clouds begin to form, followed eventually by rain. By that point your single room spaceship lifeboat, with its basic tier one crafting station and small storage locker, are long forgotten, your base construction yielding an increasingly impressive set of structures to house you technology and crafted resources.
Finding your way around the thoughtfully handmade world means building outposts you can return to, topping up oxygen and stashing rare materials to prevent them getting lost in the event of your demise. As you stray further from the valley you crash landed in, you discover how vast the map is. Just as you think you’re finding its limits, a crevice or previously hidden cave suddenly opens up into massive new undiscovered areas.
Your terraforming activities also expand the map. Rising temperatures melt ice that formerly blocked paths and as you unlock crafting recipes you’ll find explosives let you clear piles of rubble, opening fresh avenues of exploration. Your effect on its landscape is unmissable. Where there was previously only desolation, suddenly there are lakes and grasslands. Insects buzz around trees and flowers, and animals appear, while you gain the ability to tinker with DNA, creating new species to populate the increasingly fecund ecology.
Your bases, biodomes, nuclear and fusion reactors, and huge drilling rigs are soon surrounded by greenery, with vines and creepers engulfing the hulls of those wrecked starships. You’ll also begin finding messages from previous, long dead survivors, leading you into the underlying story and unpicking exactly what’s drawn you to this planetary wilderness. Most of your time, though, is spent nurturing the terraforming, monitoring stats for atmospheric heat and pressure, and the biomass of the inhabitants as they steadily tick upwards – your overall terraforming score unlocking access to better and more powerful technology.
Graphically, the game occupies a hinterland between the blockiness of Minecraft and the polished high resolution of Satisfactory. Its visuals initially look slightly low-res and dowdy, but you get used to them, your work growing the ecosystem increasing the landscape’s beauty as you progress. It’s an exhilaratingly perceptible process that propels both your exploration and technical discoveries, the world’s burgeoning life a continually evolving reflection of your labours.
What at first feel like gross oversights on the part of the developer – the lack of compass and map, slow walking pace, too few inventory slots – are in fact signs that you’re still early in the upgrade path. All those and many more quality of life improvements accrue naturally as your terraforming takes hold. It means you’re perpetually moving forward on multiple fronts, which feels enormously compelling.
The fact that you’re always engaged in several interlocking activities makes The Planet Crafter hard to put down. Setting up crafting loops, finding new biomes, building outposts, and accelerating the planet’s ecology, balancing long and short term plans, your advancement peppered by fresh discoveries and the emergence of new biological marvels to gaze at and harness for fresh breakthroughs.
Throughout all this, it’s amazing how restrained the game is in offering guidance. After the initial objectives have been met in the opening hours, it just lets you get on with it. Everything you work out how to do is the result of your own experimentation. Having said that, it’s been out since 2024 on PC, and considerably longer than that in early access, so there are plenty of wikis to fall back on if you get stuck, the organically grown community discussions mirroring the game’s own increasingly energetic wilderness.
If you enjoy freeform exploration, crafting, upgrading, and discovery, this is an inspiring place to spend time. Thought provoking, and rewarding on many different levels, The Planet Crafter manages to sustain your interest over an exceedingly long play time. Even after a hundred hours there’s plenty more to see, do, and unlock. For players who already love Subnautica or Satisfactory, this will be an essential purchase.
The Planet Crafter PS5 review summary
In Short: A deep and cleverly engineered open world crafting game, that sees you terraform a desolate rock into a riotous living ecosystem, in a process that’s impossible to put down once it gets its hooks into you.
Pros: Continually changing gameplay that begins with survival, graduates to base building, and ends with an emerging ecology that’s entirely your own creation. Compelling sense of discovery that’s made more satisfying by a concerted lack of handholding.
Cons: Graphically not as beautiful as Satisfactory and it lacks the complexity of that game’s factory building. Until you unlock the teleporter, getting around its vast open spaces can feel a little drawn out.
Score: 8/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: ÂŁ19.99
Publisher: Miju Games
Developer: Miju Games
Release Date: 21st June 2026
Age Rating: 3
Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
