With Minecraft quickly becoming the biggest selling Indie game ever you can see why many games developers want to jump on the band wagon. With my recent raid of the XBLIG section ive found 3 worthy contenders to pit against each other in a 3 way fight.
First up is FortressCraft Chapter 1, the game spawns you in a world that takes roughly 30 mins to walk across in length. You can edit your world options to make it flatland, bumpy or a bit of both. Compared to minecraft, Fortresscraft is more along the lines of minecraft's creative mode. You can get unlimited amounts of each block in the world and are free to place and destroy as you please with no worry about resources. As a builder myself i highly enjoy this game however i do feel it could do with a 'survival' type aspect to it. Your world is automatically posted online and it can be viewed and rated, your friends can come build with you and you can hunt for treasure (relics) to give you certain advantages for building like Jetpacks and speed boots.
The next game is Castle Miner, This game is very similar to FortressCraft but it gives you a much more varied landscape and some better block options (Lanterns instead of torches). You can also play with more people online than you can in Fortresscraft. Yet again it would be nice to see some kind of Survival mode in this game. One feature that isn’t in FortressCraft is most of the blocks have to be unlocked in an achievement style process, this adds a certain replay value to the game but it seems a bit pointless.
The final game is Total Miner: Forge. This game at first seems the most like minecraft as you start with nothing and you have to collect the blocks you wish to build with, you can create tools to help you and the environments vary in contents. Not to mention that this game also includes enemies to feast on your body for noms. The game does well for itself but it tries too hard to be minecraft to the point of that it tries to do better than it. The game includes a currency system and a shop sadly this is pointless and underused as you can get most of the stuff you would need to survive in a matter of minutes by mining or from lost of selling dirt and rock taking hours.
The game i enjoyed the most out of these 3 is FortressCraft, it is also the most regularly updated adding new features all the time. All 3 games are 240MS points each but it all depends what your looking for most out of the games, a freebuild (fortresscraft), a limited freebuild (castle miner) or a survival miner (total miner).
