I'll be honest--I'm lazy, and I usually don't enjoy more 'realistic' or 'hardcore' sandbox games as a result. However, I was pleasantly surprised by this game. While it is lacking in some areas, it has a lot of neat ideas and I found a lot of fun in it.
In general, The RealTest Game takes the few activities present in Minetest Game and adds greater complexity to them. In many cases, this works rather well. To give a good point of comparison, one needs only look at metalworking. In MTG, digging deep enough to find any ore is the entire "challenge". On the other hand, ore is plentiful and rather easy to find in RTG... but you need clay for vessels to cast the metal, lots of charcoal to smelt down the metal, a strong anvil to work the metal on... Instead of spending half an hour digging a staircase, you spend half an hour planning, exploring the world, and gathering supplies. It makes an otherwise boring game much more interesting.
Sadly, the game is not without its weak points. With no dangers, hunger, or other external forces, there's not really much to push the player forward aside from curiosity about the game. There are awards, which in a better game (NodeCore) could act as hints/goals for the player... but for some reason, there's no easily-accessible UI for them. Seems like an oversight. I also really don't like how the game forces you to manually click on items to grab them, yet has no problem magnet-ing them over to you. And then of course there's the fact that you can 'chop down' a tree by just breaking the block under it with your fist. This is not a game without flaws.
And sadly, those flaws are likely to remain. This game is not actively developed, though I think if it were it could be an honest contender for the top of CDB. I see this as a good opportunity for any enterprising modder looking for a project to jump on, and a few fun hours of discovery for a normal player.
I'll be honest--I'm lazy, and I usually don't enjoy more 'realistic' or 'hardcore' sandbox games as a result. However, I was pleasantly surprised by this game. While it is lacking in some areas, it has a lot of neat ideas and I found a lot of fun in it.
In general, The RealTest Game takes the few activities present in Minetest Game and adds greater complexity to them. In many cases, this works rather well. To give a good point of comparison, one needs only look at metalworking. In MTG, digging deep enough to find any ore is the entire "challenge". On the other hand, ore is plentiful and rather easy to find in RTG... but you need clay for vessels to cast the metal, lots of charcoal to smelt down the metal, a strong anvil to work the metal on... Instead of spending half an hour digging a staircase, you spend half an hour planning, exploring the world, and gathering supplies. It makes an otherwise boring game much more interesting.
Sadly, the game is not without its weak points. With no dangers, hunger, or other external forces, there's not really much to push the player forward aside from curiosity about the game. There are awards, which in a better game (NodeCore) could act as hints/goals for the player... but for some reason, there's no easily-accessible UI for them. Seems like an oversight. I also really don't like how the game forces you to manually click on items to grab them, yet has no problem magnet-ing them over to you. And then of course there's the fact that you can 'chop down' a tree by just breaking the block under it with your fist. This is not a game without flaws.
And sadly, those flaws are likely to remain. This game is not actively developed, though I think if it were it could be an honest contender for the top of CDB. I see this as a good opportunity for any enterprising modder looking for a project to jump on, and a few fun hours of discovery for a normal player.