Eden Crafters took a few hours to grow on me. But it has its own charm beyond the games that clearly inspire it.

Eden Crafters is very much a slightly ugly love child of The Planet Crafter and Satisfactory. It combines the terraforming goals of the first with the automation of the second. And to be honest, it doesn't do either nearly as well as the base games. The world isn't as varied, the terraforming as deep, or the transformation as awe inspiring as with the former. And there is no way the game could be expected to match how incredible, elegant and complex an automation system the latter provides.

But it does marry the two. And there were times playing both of the base games (Satisfactory in particular) where I really wanted the game to combine the concepts. So I spent a few hours enjoying the game for what it was and trying to ignore the feeling I had already played a better version of the same game. Then I started to see some really fun differences.

I think I started to feel the more unique elements of the game when I first got vehicle batteries and could use the space ship I landed in to travel swiftly around the world. I found the landscaping vehicles to be weak, but the tunneling vehicle is awesome.

I started to appreciate the difference in the stages of terraforming from The Planet Crafter. They make sense. Stages like "go to the hottest zone and build a research station using environmentally hardened base pieces".

I am really hoping that Early Access means they are going to refine and enrich what they already have as well expand the game farther. Honestly, by the time I reached the end of current content, I felt I had played 99% of a full game and I was just shy of a respectable game over. But I wished that along the way, I had been able to do more customization, build a more elegant factory, create and decorate a base I wanted to live in and show off.

Biggest grief is is that you can put a concrete block down near a deposit and it destroys it and ya get nothing. Makes the game absolutely frustrating. Build a whole production plant for something only to have your source now 500 meters away because you dropped one block near a deposit.

I like that you can flatten your area if you want, food, water and oxygen is easy to craft. I don't like that there aren't any "wrecks" to discover, and that you can't fill in deep areas. I also wish there were things like bathroom builds, living room, tv's. But I'm only 10 hours into the game so we'll see what happens. I had to edit this. One feature I LOVE that I can edit the mode of play for each game, something I wish Planet Crafter had.