[b]Completion:[/b] ~32.4 hours, 2-player co-op, all main and side quests completed, 23/23 achievements, full map explored including [spoiler]Overworld[/spoiler] and [spoiler]Underworld[/spoiler].
[b]Overall Score:[/b] 4/10
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[h1]Interesting as a creature-collecting sandbox, disappointing as a survival crafting game.[/h1]
Recommended if you only want to explore a visually interesting tiny-world map as a light creature-taming sandbox more than a polished survival crafting game and can tolerate unfinished-feeling systems, weak co-op design, and many bugs.
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[h2]Context[/h2]
Platform: PC
Controls: mixed keyboard + mouse and controller
Playtime at review: ~32.4 hours
Mode played: co-op
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[h2]What This Game Is in 2-3 Sentences[/h2]
Smalland is a tiny-person survival crafting game about exploring a large wilderness, gathering materials, crafting gear, taming creatures, and moving from NPC to NPC while clearing bosses. The basic concept is interesting, and the world can be fun to discover at first, especially in co-op.
The core loop: walk from NPC to NPC, get pointed at the next boss, level or replace your companions because they do most of the fighting, then repeat. Crafting exists, but most of the time it feels like a requirement checklist rather than the main driving force of the game.
What makes it interesting/unique: the scale of the world, creature taming, mobile tree bases, and traversal tools are all promising ideas, but the progression often makes earlier systems obsolete almost immediately.
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[h2]What Is Especially Good[/h2]
1) The initial exploration has a strong hook. Seeing the world from a smallfolk perspective, moving through oversized environments, and discovering new creatures is easily the best part of the game.
2) Some individual systems sound great on paper. Mounts, egg hatching, taming, wings, tree bases, and co-op exploration all have potential, and for short moments they do feel exciting.
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[h2]What Is Problematic[/h2]
1) The game constantly cancels out its own good ideas. Mounts become mostly pointless after stronger wings and later traversal options, egg hatching is quickly made irrelevant by traps and taming, and the tree base system reduces the need to build meaningful outposts.
2) As a survival crafting game, it barely needs survival or crafting. Food is almost never a real pressure, weather has little meaningful impact, base building is mostly just storage and crafting stations under a roof, and progression has very poor power scaling across areas.
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[h2]Technical State[/h2]
FPS / stability / loading: playable, but the overall technical state feels rough and unfinished
Bugs: frequent
Note: The map is unreliable, especially with vertical spaces like [spoiler]Underworld[/spoiler]. We ran into texture clipping, broken terrain interaction, inconsistent companion health values, unreliable pet revival, weak quest tracking, and even a quest issue where the official workaround was effectively to leave co-op, do it in single-player, then return to co-op.
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[h2]Price / Value / Monetization[/h2]
Full price: hard to justify
On sale: only worth considering on a deep discount
Microtransactions / DLC: no microtransactions, no DLC
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[h2]Summary in 2 Sentences[/h2]
Who I recommend it to: maybe to players who mainly want to explore an interesting small-scale world once, or to those who enjoy a light creature-collecting angle where the main appeal is taming different animals, figuring out what they can do, and using their abilities more than their own character build.
Who I do not recommend it to: anyone expecting a strong co-op survival crafting game, a polished alternative to Grounded, meaningful progression, repeatable bosses, deep building, good combat balance, or a finished-feeling world after the main map opens up.
