Craft Hero: Prologue Gameplay Preview

If you played Craft Hero: Prologue, you can tell right away that it’s probably a port of a mobile game. The user interface is not ideal for a keyboard and mouse and seems better suited for a touch screen. However, once you look past the game’s minor flaws, it is actually a pretty simple but addictingly fun survival crafting game.

The game is separated into day and night cycles. During the day you explore the map to collect resources and build up your base. During the night, hordes of monsters will attack until sunrise. The game play loop is abstractly similar to something like 7 Days to Die.

The mechanics are pretty simple, although it can be sort of difficult to figure everything out the first time through. You simply run into blocks on the map to mine them, and then you run into enemies to fight them. You run into objects or people to interact with them. Once you run into them, it brings up a menu for further interaction.

Once you mine enough minerals, chop down enough trees, and cut down enough grass, you come back to your base to start crafting upgrades and building up your defenses. You can unlock more buildings in the research table, and then from there build your traditional structures such as a smelting furnace for crafting metals and alloys. You can also build more defensive structures such as ballistas and roadblocks to defend your base against the horde of monsters. As you spend more days in the game, the monsters grow progressively stronger each night.

You can even recruit npc characters to join your village and each has a special ability such as healing damaged units and etc. You can upgrade most things so while the game may look shallow, it still has enough depth to the game play.

It is pretty satisfying moving around, mindlessly collecting all the resources the land has to offer. Researching, upgrading, and building up your base into a mighty, monster slaying stronghold is also engaging. The only real flaw as of now is the user interface. Simple, repetitive tasks such as building walls takes way too many mouse clicks. For example, you have to select the build menu, select the roadblock the first time through, select build, and place it down in one of the four squares around you. If you want to build the roadblock a second time, you need to move to the correct tile, go select build, select build again, and select a tile. It would be much simpler to simply select build, go select the roadblock, and then press the tiles where you want roadblocks placed.

While the user interface is frustrating, it’s only a minor inconvenience that doesn’t detract too much from the overall experience. Overall, Craft Hero is shaping up to be a fun, simple, and engaging survival crafting game. Hopefully the user interface gets an overhaul for increased efficiency for keyboard and mouse players.