GAMING|Raft — First Impressions

July 22, 2018

“What? A gaming post from Minty…?” Yes~ Let’s continue the All That is Broken series by Minty (A reminder: Every game I play gets broken somehow…). For the past week or so I’ve been playing Raft with my sister and my friend Danny. You can call us the Princess Sisters Squad: Ax Wielding Murder Princess (Me), Boss Princess (My sister), and Glitter/Sparkle Princess (Danny). Anyway, we were looking for a new game to play. Raft seemed pretty and interesting, so we bought it and gave it a shot.

The game is by Redbeet Interactive and Axolot Games. It was released March, 23, 2018. However, it is still an early access game. It’s up on [Steam] for $19.99 at the moment.

Description (From Steam):
Raft throws you and your friends into an epic oceanic adventure! Alone or together, players battle to survive a perilous voyage across a vast sea! Gather debris, scavenge reefs and build your own floating home, but be wary of the man-eating sharks!

The game itself is a survival and crafting game. You can play it single player, online multi-player, or online co-op. Raft also has 4 game modes: Creative, Easy, Normal, and Hard. Creative mode has unlimited supplies and health as it allows you to focus more on building than survival. Easy mode is easier to maintain your hunger and thirst, and you won’t lose your inventory when respawning. Normal mode is the average difficulty for the average player. Lastly, you have Hard mode. You can’t respawn without the help of a friend. You basically start off on a 2×2 raft. You have a plastic hook on you that you must use to collect resources and materials. You can use it to collect any floating debris or scavenge reefs at any islands you come across. You then can build more tools, as well as expanding your raft and making it your home. However, you must be careful of the sharks that will not only attack you in the water, but they’ll attack parts of your raft as well.

I will say that the game is beautiful done. The environment looks spectacular. I really love seeing how the environment changes from day to night, and from calm seas to raging storms. I actually do like taking in the opportunity to enjoy the sunrise, sunset, and starry night skies in this game.

Crafting is easy enough. You just hit the tab key to pull up your crafting options. Obviously you need materials for crafting. You can collect any floating debris, look for materials on any islands you pass by, or even dive and search the reefs. Note that there will be more floating debris during a storm. A tip: you can build collector nets around your raft. It’ll collect anything that floats through for you. Super helpful during a storm. For our raft we basically had collecting nets all around the whole raft so we wouldn’t miss anything we floated through. You can see we also went crazy and made some crazy ass (and hella extra) “ramps”. They were the roofs that made hella extended. Why? Why not?~ Okay, so we did this to easily access the really tall islands. The Princess Sisters are not above cheating. We do all that we can to find little cheats haha. It was also fun to try to collect debris, fish, and enjoy the sunsets from there. I’ll get to more on our raft in a bit.

Again, the pros of this game is that it’s easy to play and super gorgeous. However, it does get kind of old after an hour or two. It’s very limited in what you can explore, do, and craft. For my sister and I, we’re the type of people who really like to build and decorate things. Heck, that’s usually what we do in the Sims instead of playing God. However, there’s not much you can really build to decorate the raft and make it home. You have basically two types of bedding, a table, chairs, a rug, and a few nick-knacks. You can make a paint brush and add some color. The only thing to keep it interesting at this stage is just how you decide to expand and improve the raft itself. However, that’s it. It’s understandable though, since this is an early access game. I just hope there are a variety of options in the full game. We did eventually get kind of bored. We’re that group that’s not overly serious and so we tend to mess around when playing games. So we opted to just kind of go crazy to make the game more interesting. I should note that we played both easy mode and crafting mode. Crafting mode does give you the ability to try to build your raft however you wish, with unlimited materials. However, it’s boring after a while. The shark swims around, but won’t interact with you or the raft. The water and weather are always calm, and there are no debris or islands to interact with. Easy mode was a simple way to enjoy the game without having to worry about losing all of our stuff. Another thing is that it is a bit hard to start off; Although it’s slightly easier if you’re playing with friends. All in all though, it’s a wonderful game and I’m looking forward to the completely finished product.

BONUS: Shennanigans

You saw our crazy ramps right? Well, we also tried to make hella long docks. We wanted to see how far we could get. Remember the hella long ramps? Well, we tried to extend it as much as we could

It got to the point that we caused the game to lag hard. I got pretty far out that if I started during the day, I wouldn’t get to the end until nightfall. I could barely see our raft from the top.

ALL THAT IS BROKEN MOMENTS

We had issues where someone would be stuck in the floor when trying to join the game. This only happened in creative mode. The most common issue we had was whenever we dropped stuff from our inventory. We basically had frozen stuff in midair. I broke it and made it a giant blob of boxes. I also had a barrel stuck on my hook… Sometimes I’d try to go into one of the storage boxes and the menu would be stuck open, leaving me unable to interact with anything else.