Core Keeper Review

Core Keeper is a multiplayer mining sandbox adventure that was released in Early Access in 2022, before reaching its 1.0 update in 2024. Developed by Pugstorm and published by Fireshine Games and bilibili, this game will have you (and up to eight of your friends) exploring vast caverns, fighting creatures of the dark, and turning the place into a giant underground factory. It received widespread praise throughout its publicly playable existence, boasting captivating visuals, challenging gameplay, and satisfying design.

Sadly, we never got around to reviewing the game… until now! With the release of the Void & Voltage update, it’s high time we fix this mistake! Let’s dive down into the depths and see what it has to offer in this whole new subterranean world.

In the base game, you play as a customisable explorer who stumbled upon a mysterious Core while on an adventure. In a flash of light, you are teleported away from your adventuring party. Now trapped (in a procedurally generated) underground, your goal is to figure out what exactly the Core is, get it working, and find out why you’re down here to begin with. Of course, such a journey won’t be easy even with friends to help you out…

As stated before, the pixel art graphics are very beautiful and detailed, with some great animations and effects that can get pretty wild; the freaking water is better than some AAA 3D games. Even seeing how blocks distort with each hit can be satisfying to see. The biomes themselves are extremely diverse in ores, special areas, and creatures. They can be fun to explore… you know, once you light up the area enough to see it all. It’s awfully dark, both literally (you are living under the earth) and tonally.

As for the soundtrack, I found it quite pleasant. Composed by Jonathan Geer, it consists of many tunes that range from peaceful and calm, tense and frightening, to epic and heroic. It definitely set me in the right mood while I was getting the hang of the game. That’s not all, though, as Core Keeper lets you craft/find instruments and lets you play your own tunes. Gather enough friends (and maybe take a crash course in music), and you can play together in a virtual jam session. I always love it when games have this as a feature.

But that’s enough about the presentation, what about the much-beloved gameplay I’ve heard so much about? Well, for starters, the game doesn’t give you much of a tutorial after the starting cutscene, but it shouldn’t be too much of a problem if you’ve played games like Terraria before (which had a crossover with it). Starting off with a few basic tools and food (or not even that if you choose the Nomad background), you'll need to gather enough materials to craft the necessary equipment needed to face the many tough foes ahead and eventually thrive in the caverns. This is a tried and true formula that has kept me engaged for many hours in plenty of different games.

Core Keeper’s gameplay is rather smooth. Whether you’re on keyboard and mouse or on a gamepad, I never felt like I was restricted. Building was easy to do, combat was challenging yet rewarding, and inventory management wasn’t too bad.

However, I think I appreciated the progression from a lowly nobody to a god-killing machine a lot more than I should, starting off with how you level up your various skills. From fighting and mining to magic and technology, you gain EXP as you use them, eventually earning a point spent on making that particular task easier or more rewarding. I found this system to be pretty nice, as it feels more like bonuses for doing things you like rather than necessary upgrades needed to complete the game.

Meanwhile, you’ll be improving your equipment by finding new ore and crafting new workbenches from them, making stronger tools, then using them to mine tougher walls for stronger resources to craft a better workbench and start that whole process all over again. Although I sort of wish I only needed to upgrade one workbench instead of making new ones each and every time, and it can be a bit tedious, it does encourage you to go further out to discover stuff as you slowly become more capable of handling more serious threats.

All in all, I found the progression to be quite good. It’s not so fast that you become overpowered too soon, but it’s not achingly slow that it feels like a chore. It all feels natural and fun to do, and with enough time and effort, you can become a nigh-unkillable demi-god who can take on actual gods. Going from a basic sword and shield setup to lasers, mining guns, and summoning hell demons is a serious rush once you realise how far you’ve come.

That’s not all, as no good hero should relegate themselves to constantly tending to such things as maintaining their supply of food for very long. Through technology, you can automate the more mundane tasks of survival, like farming and mining for common ore, possibly turning a section of the underground into a factory for you to exploit. I don’t really mess with this type of thing too often, but I’ve seen quite a few videos on what other players have made, and they are pretty cool. They really helped once I got far enough into the game that I needed to automate some things.

However, I didn’t figure this all out on my own. For several hours, I had no idea what I should be doing other than making better crafting tables and better equipment. As a completely new player, I recommend having the wiki on hand, as while the game does nudge you in places, ultimately, you’re on your own. You might even miss out on using one of the many quality-of-life features, like automatically dumping items into chests. Once you discover the button (Q on mouse and keyboard) to do so, you might never go back.

With all that being said, though, I’m not quite done yet, as I need to cover the free expansion to Core Keeper: the Void & Voltage update. This adds a bunch of new items, new biomes, new enemies, and new features requested by the community.

As implied by the name, the theme of the update is machinery and how it can improve/threaten your life. In the new biome, Breaker’s Reach (and the Void sub-biome), there will be tons of freaky ore to mine and loot to gather to craft a whole variety of different weapons, armour, and machines.

Unleash your inner arsonist with the new flamethrower, tear through mountains of stone with the electric laser, pay your foes back tenfold with the Void armour set, or create even more complex factories. There’s quite a lot of stuff being added here, all for free, and that’s amazing. That being said, you will need a specific key to actually experience all this new content though.

But you better put all of that to good use, as there is a fancy new dungeon to explore and an intimidating boss waiting at the end: S.A.H.A.B.A.R, a giant robot who will not hesitate to destroy you with a bunch of insane attacks that will push your timing skills to the limit. I got a save file that allowed me to experience what it had to offer without spending hours upon hours working to that point, and let me tell you, even with the provided high-level equipment (including the very overpowered Stormbringer), I got murdered really quickly, so be ready for a serious fight.

There are a bunch of other features and tweaks in the update I haven’t mentioned, but this review is long enough and you can always check the patch notes to see how much has changed to make Core Keeper a little more enjoyable.

Core Keeper is yet another labour of love in the same league of games like Terraria and Stardew Valley, with plenty of content updates that improve an already great game. I want to play this game more, despite kind of being thrown into the deep end. For new players, this is a definite must-have to add to your library of games. To veterans, you should love all the new toys, bells, and whistles added.