Survive Craft - Knockoff of a Knockoff

By Oliver Giles

AVAILABLE ON: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Android 

Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time by a large margin, with over 70 million more copies sold than Grand Theft Auto V, the runner-up in that department. And ever since Mojang’s flagship sandbox game exploded in popularity in the early 2010s, there have been seemingly infinite knockoff titles and copycats. For example, before Minecraft finally released on the New Nintendo 3DS in 2017, 3DS users made do with Battle Miner, and who could forget all the online Adobe Flash and Unity Player powered ripoffs.

Surprisingly, despite Minecraft being available on practically every device imaginable at this point, the flood of imitations just keeps on coming. And while games such as Portal Knights took the Minecraft formula and built upon it, adding a fun story with fantasy RPG elements and beautiful visuals, most of the Minecraft-inspired titles are less than good, to say the least.

And then there’s Survive Craft, something so putrid and awful It makes the old 2D side-scrolling Minecraft game on Code Academy seem like a triple-A title.

Developed by SoteroApps and available on Android, PC, and Xbox One/Xbox Series S|X, I thought I knew exactly what I was getting into when I dropped $2.99 on the download. I expected a cheap-feeling Minecraft-esc building game with maybe some basic survival elements and probably an easy 1,000 Gamerscore worth of achievements, something akin to the aforementioned Battle Miner. I could hardly have been more wrong.

The first thing I noticed while the game was loading was that there were no achievements for the game, and while some of the free, poorly developed titles on the Xbox store don’t have them, the ones priced at over $1.99 typically have at least a few worth a couple hundred Gamerscore. And while this is certainly annoying, to say the least, it was nothing compared to the game itself.

Obviously, I wasn’t expecting complex game mechanics or a refined sound engine, but Survive Craft doesn’t even bother to have controls listed for the correct platform. Despite playing it on an Xbox Series X, the only controls shown on the screen were for the PC version of the game, meaning players on other devices have to figure out how to play for themselves.

One thing about the controls that is apparent right from the beginning, though is that they suck. While you use the right-stick to look around, the typical setup for a controller, the y-axis is automatically inverted with no way to change it. In fact, you better like the default settings of the game because there’s no way to change any of them.

While the graphics are okay for a knockoff title, I’ve certainly seen worse,

The frame rate is abysmal. What’s the point of having satisfying tree-felling mechanics if you can only see it at an archaic 20 FPS? Incredibly annoying, considering that other Minecraft knockoffs tend to run at at least 30 or 40 frames per second.

The building system is far from fluid, even by Minecraft-imitation standards. Obviously, I wasn’t expecting a Portal Knights level of build complexity for a game with a sub-$3.00 price tag, but I’ve seen better in demos of other knockoffs.

With the sloppy and unresponsive controls, not to mention the unforgivably bad frame rate, it took me a full ten minutes to put together the basic box house.

I would tell you if there were monsters to fight or animals to kill but at this point my will to continue evaporated. I’ve sat through some frustrating games for the purpose of reviews in the past, but 20 minutes in Survive Craft proved to be too much.

An experience that left me mentally exhausted by the end of it, Survive Craft is one of the most disgusting games I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with. And while I may come back to it if I ever make a review list of Minecraft clones, that is the only situation I would ever subject myself to such a torturous experience.