Crashlands
Review

Crashlands (2016) is a world-building game where you fight monsters, craft resources, and build a base on an alien planet. As you explore, either on your own or with a friend, you encounter locals, complete quests and missions, and meet strange new enemies. It combines exacting combat with exploration, simulation, and a cartoon visual style to create a finely balanced challenge.

You play galactic trucker Flux Dabes, who crash-lands on the planet Woanope. As you strive to retrieve your parcels scattered across the planet's surface, you must fight the strange creatures you meet (or maybe just steal their eggs and tame their offspring as personal companions.

As you trek far and wide, you also discover the planet's sentient locals, who you can interact with, build relationships with, and complete quests for them in exchange for helpful rewards. By gathering resources, you then create a base and start a new life.

It's a mix of exploration, fighting, and base-building. Combat is fast-paced and precise, and you defeat enemies using a variety of weapons, including laser guns and flamethrowers. Although you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed, you can always run away from fights, and learning when to do this is essential.

You unlock new weapons by crafting them with the resources you gather from exploration, and you also use these same resources to create your base, creating new items to decorate it with and expanding it with new walls. Offspring you tame can join you as you explore and can also attack enemies, providing an incentive to risk exploring enemy lairs for their eggs.

The result is a game that combines classic role-playing elements like interacting with inhabitants and completing missions with challenging, skill-based combat and detailed and highly personal base-building and crafting. Experimenting with different weapons and tools to find what works best for you can often lead to unusual discoveries and a play style unique to you.

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Crashlands 15 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 5 months ago.