Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore (PC) Preview

Early Access games have become a staple of the gaming landscape over the last six years or so. They are typically single player games that either have some form of co-op at the beginning or add it later on. Rarely are any of these Early Access games MMOs, which is what initially made Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore sound quite fascinating to me. The question is, was the fascination well deserved?

Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore is described on its Steam page as, “A social survival game set in the open world of Ultracore. Build, grow, and defend your town. Survive the elements and Sorgoth’s onslaught. Cooperate as you go on adventures to loot, gather resources, and make history. All of it together with friends old and new.” There is a lot to examine about Coreborn through this description given by Blankhans, the novice development studio behind this game, so let’s dive in!

Let’s go one sentence at a time, starting with “A social survival game set in the open world of Ultracore.” While there is certainly a social aspect to this game by seeing other players, finding their towns, talking through text chat, and being able to form teams, there isn’t much to do beyond that. Looking at people’s constructions can be interesting, but that can only last for so long.

There are no community events nor anything meaningful to do that can create a sense of unity in the game. The setting of the game (Ultracore) is at first quite fascinating with the story that is provided in the prologue. Beyond this, there doesn’t appear to be a story to hook the player into the world. There are some scattered ruins and a few random NPCs, but nothing and no one to interact with. It kind of feels like Fallout 76 when it first came out with a weird emptiness.

The second line of “Build, grow, and defend your town” requires a little bit of tweaking. Repair should be added to one of the three things you will be doing with your town. All parts of your town will degrade over time, which will require you to repair them. This degradation happens in real-time, which gives you the annoying responsibility of logging onto the game every few days to repair it if you really care about your town.

Also, calling your building area a “town” is quite generous as the building zone is a bit small. Also, the building mechanics of the game are quite irritating to the point where many of my structures wouldn’t work due to either the unevenness of the ground that was chosen or there wasn’t enough “support” for the building. This “support” issue continued to happen even after I added additional pillars to the bottom of it. That problem made no sense to me unless the physics of this world is different from our own.

“Survive the elements and Sorgoth’s onslaught” are two things that I never really had to worry about while playing Coreborn. I found it to be quite disappointing considering that Sorgoth and his forces were heavily mentioned in the prologue to be the Sauron and Orc Army of this world. The elements weren’t too much of a bother, except for the animals, which occasionally proved challenging.

Surprisingly, the horses proved to be the key cause of death for my friends and I. My hope is that over time the animals will be a bit more recognizable as passive or aggressive. If that change is made, new players can move away from dangerous situations when they are low on health.

The other two lines have been discussed already, so I am not going to worry about going over them. At this point in time, I cannot personally recommend Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore. Despite all of the negative reviews it has gotten on the Steam page and my own lackluster experience with it, I hope that the developers will continue to work on this game.

If it was a painting, I feel like it would be a piece that has been outlined and the paints are just being selected. My hope is that we will one day see the piece of art that the developers have envisioned. If you would like to read another preview, check out Mike Reitemeir’s preview of Pepper Grinder right here.

A PC preview copy of Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore was provided by Blankhans for this preview.