Core Keeper Review – An ore-mining, boss-beating delight

thesixthaxis.com:

Core Keeper is a mining sandbox game that will feel fairly familiar if you’ve played something like Terraria but still manages to not only stand on its own two feet but sprint full-speed ahead to keep things entertaining. Put simply, it’s an excellent game that’ll keep you entertained for hours to come, and has plenty of things to discover and biomes to explore.

You awake in a cavern deep underground with nothing to guide you outside of four mysterious statues. So, whatever class you’ve chosen to start as, and there are a bunch, has to simply start digging and exploring. As you go you’ll come across bosses to fight, dungeons to delve into, and new materials to mine. The basic gameplay loop is that you find a new material, mine it, upgrade your stuff, and then keep going until the next one.

However, each new biome presents new monsters and hazards to worry about, including special debuffs that you’ll need to experiment with to understand fully. The bosses all have specific attack patterns to learn as well, and while they’re not complicated, you’ll need to fully master your movement and attacks to actually overcome any of them.

Speaking of attacks, you can broadly split your attacks into melee, ranged, magical, and summons. Each of these has its own skill tree to work your way through, as do skills like mining, cooking, and even running, and each of them also has its own weapons and armour to find and craft. You can, if you want, constantly switch between different classes of weapons, but you’ll be rewarded for sticking with one or two.

You can also upgrade even the lowest-level items to keep up with higher-level ones if you decide that you prefer the way they attack. I ran a summon build that also wielded a grenade launcher of sorts, because it allowed me to mine chunks of rocks from a distance. It’s all about your own freedom when it comes to how you play.

Of course, the big draw, at least for me, with these kinds of games is the co-op, and being able to explore the