If you took Stardew Valley and Minecraft and smashed them together you’d get Core Keeper. Except it goes much deeper than that (pun intended). You get the top-down angle and pixel art style that makes Stardew Valley so special and the infinitely expanding crafting experience that you get with a game like Minecraft.

The popularity of this genre of games always fascinated me. They’re just so good and it’s difficult to explain why. You just gotta try it for yourself and you’ll understand.

Core Keeper has been available on Steam for a number of years now but it’s now being released on consoles and I was able to play the Xbox Series X version. It launches day 1 on Xbox GamePass.

Story

Core Keeper doesn’t really seem to have a “story”, it’s really more of a directive. You wake up deep underground, not knowing where you are or how you got there. You aren’t given any instruction so you have to figure it all out as you go. There is a mysterious device called the “core” and interacting with it says that it needs power. Powering it on seems to be the only way out.

Gameplay

You start the game by naming your world and creating your character. You can pick from a variety of classes that give you specific starting items and skills. I went with a Ranger for the ranged attack.

There’s little to no instruction on how to play which may be off-putting to some but I found it quite intriguing. Once you figure out that you can break a tree root and get a piece of wood you realize how this all works. You can then take the wood you gather to create things like shovels and pickaxes that help you mind the dirt around you to gather more kinds of materials to craft more things.

There's so many layers of things you can make. It really feels like each time I got to the next level there was always another layer above that I could get to. First with wood items, then copper, then tin. It just keeps going!

Each new level also allows you to create more gadgets and gizmos that help increase efficiency in all of the things you’re doing. With tin you can create a watering can and grow crops but with iron you can make a bigger watering can that waters 4 spots at once, making it so much faster to grow crops which can help you create potions and food.

The entire map is procedurally generated and it goes on forever. When I say forever, I mean it. You can keep walking in one direction and it will just keep generating new areas of the map.

Wizard Needs Food Badly

In Core Keeper your character can get hungry and that’s measured by a bar that’s below your health bar. When you eat food the bar refills. Raw food is the quickest way but can sometimes come with debuffs. You can cook food to increase the impact and get some stat boosts as well.

Think of this mechanic as more of a stamina bar than an actual hunger bar. Hunger goes down when you’re moving and when you’re performing actions (other than attacking). Rest assured, you won’t die when that bar hits zero. When you’re hungry you’ll move slower and your attacks will be weaker, but it’s still important to keep that bar full just in case you run into enemies.

It can be a real pain to have to eat so often but once you start cooking food from the items you collect you’ll find dishes that not only fill that meter quickly, but they’ll also heal you quite a bit too. This legitimizes the cooking portion of the crafting as it becomes incredibly useful to have high quality cooked food in your inventory.

In this Economy?

As you play you’ll meet merchants and if you place their totem in your base they’ll effectively move in. Once they've arrived, you can speak to them to buy and sell items.

I understand the concept of having multiple merchants that sell a different variety of things but the fact that I can’t sell my items right from my inventory seems like a weird choice. It causes selling things to take so much time. For example, to sell items you need to speak to the merchant, manually move items from your inventory over to their inventory, and then click sell. This is probably much less of an issue with a mouse and keyboard but on an Xbox controller, this action takes a long time and I ended up just hoarding items in lieu of selling them.

Money in Core Keeper is also an item that takes up an item slot. You really only spend money in your base so it's not a huge deal but having to store the money in a chest and then go and find it when you need it was a little bit annoying.

Combat

Combat is simple in Core Keeper. You press a single button and your character attacks with their equipped weapon. There are various different weapon types, both long range and close quarters.

Daggers are quick but only stab directly in front of the character, Swords swing wide and can hit multiple enemies, and blunt weapons like a hammer are slower but deal more damage.

Various bows and magic staves allow you to fire out from a distance. You use a cursor to aim and press the attack button to fire. These are useful for when your enemy is across a body of water. Some enemies also have ranged attacks so carrying around a bow just in case is a good idea. Magic items use up your mana but at the end of the attack that meter will fill back up automatically.

I found that ranged fighting using the Xbox controller was a bit difficult. Ranged attacks work by pointing a cross hair in the direction of the enemy and pressing the attack button. On a mouse and keyboard this is probably fairly easy. On the Xbox controller it was a bit hard to master. You need to use the right stick to aim and it’s not nearly as precise as a mouse can get. I found myself missing a lot or shooting at walls when trying to hide around corners.

Various armors and other items help out with combat as well. You can pick up a shield to block attacks, a feather that lets you dash to dodge attacks, and a magic item that refills your mana quicker. You can only equip one of these kinds of items at a time so you’ll need to be strategic with it.

There’s a slew of bosses to defeat, each wildly different from the last. When you defeat each one you’ll get a special item that helps you unlock powering the core.

Performance

This is a pixel art game that could run perfectly fine on a potato. This review is specifically for the Xbox port of Core Keeper which I played on a Series X. The Series X is a powerful device so there were absolutely no performance issues. The map is procedurally generated so it goes on forever. Even when scrolling large sections that I’ve uncovered, it never stuttered or hiccuped in any way.

Overall Impressions

Ultimately this game is probably better played on PC with a mouse and keyboard but the experience on Xbox was mostly good. Although connecting a mouse and keyboard to an Xbox does work in some cases, I did not try it. I wanted to have a full experience using just the controller to play this game. Upwards of 90% of the controls actually translate well to a controller but there are definitely still things that may need to be tweaked.

I can easily see why Core Keeper is so very loved. The gameplay loop gets super addictive and the sheer amount of things to craft makes this game infinitely playable and infinitely customizable. It’s definitely a game that you can play for hours on end.

Core Keeper is now available on Steam, Xbox Series X/S, and Playstation 5. Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch versions will be available on September 17th.

Gamer Social Club was provided a code for Core Keeper from the publisher for review purposes.