Crafty Lands is a block building game heavily inspired by the award-winning game Minecraft. You are thrust into a 3D world of cubes and sent on your way to explore, build, and craft a world.
The game is marketed towards children, with the cute graphics and designs, and the incentive to use your imagination to shape the world around you using all the tools and items you can find and craft.
This is an excellent game to keep your kids busy for hours. Let's check it out.
Main Objectives and Features
If you are familiar with the inspiration for Crafty Lands, Minecraft, you'll get to grips with what this game has to offer quickly. The main objective is to explore and create within this vast sandbox of a world, limited only really by your imagination.
All your constructions and buildings in the game are entirely block-based, allowing you to mix and match different materials and block types to create these massive structures as you fly around and shape the world to your heart's content.
This block-building premise is the basis of the game, but some other features have been added to make it more than just a glorified video game version of a LEGO set.
For example, item crafting is a big part of the game. There are plenty of different items with varying effects, from drills you can use to power yourself through underground cave systems to magical staff, which will help you even further with crafting.
You're not the only one in the world either. There are plenty of other characters and animals you can interact with, and even pets can claim to follow you around and play with as you enjoy the vast expanse of Crafty Lands.
All of this can be completed with a simple and intuitive user interface that is super easy for kids to understand, allowing you to navigate this sandbox world without a cluttered screen easily.
This is a game that encourages creativity and exploration, giving back to you what you put in. You are encouraged to go out and craft your world filled with adventure of your own making, all while you shape it with a diverse collection of blocks.
The Pros
As a game that is very clearly inspired by Minecraft, you can expect this game to be quite expansive in its design. The game's overworld is vast and densely populated with items, blocks, layouts, and characters.
The incentive to craft, create, and explore is also a big plus, letting players fully explore their creative side as they can escape into a world of their creation. The world that is generated upon starting is only a template for greater things.
As simple as it is, creating your custom avatar is an entertaining feature that everyone loves. To fully customize yourself and watch as your avatar flies around the game world is a satisfying feeling.
While it all may seem overwhelming on paper, being dropped into this expansive and vast cubed world, with material after material and item after item thrown at you as you explore, the game manages to stagger the information overload quite well.
The smart interface and world layout let you explore and learn at your leisure.
The Cons
No game is perfect, unfortunately, and Crafty Lands has some glaring cons that you simply can't ignore.
With a game as expansive and densely populated as this, it is unexpectedly lonely, and this seems to be a design choice.
It isn't some grand design scheme with a hidden story; it's actually just that the developers hid multiplayer functionality behind a paywall, making it a premium feature.
This multiplayer pass is an additional cost on top of the premium pass, meaning you have to pay more than one monthly sum to enjoy the full game. There are portions of the map hidden behind these further costs, which can severely limit the experience.
How to Download It
Getting the game is simple enough. You can get the game for Android here and iOS here.
Summary
If you or your kid loves to play games that encourage creativity and exploration, then Crafty Lands is an excellent choice as a Minecraft inspired game. However, be aware that many features are locked behind premium paywalls.
To check out some other cool games, take a look here.
