Crashlands 2

Introduction

Crashlands 2 strands a new interstellar trader on a hostile alien world, tasking them with crafting tools, fighting increasingly strange creatures and building a base sturdy enough to survive long enough to find a way home. It's the sequel to Butterscotch Shenanigans' beloved original — a game many of its fans discovered on mobile before it made the jump to PC and console — and it released 10 April 2025 for NZ$35.99. Reception has been strong and durable: 93.2% positive across 680 English-language Steam reviews, roughly 88% across its wider 2,443-review all-language corpus, both comfortably Very Positive well over a year on. This review reads all 46 of the game's English negative reviews in full and finds a launch defined by two specific, well-documented rough edges, set against a game whose actual content and post-launch support draw real, substantiated praise.

A visual leap the whole sample agrees on

Start with the least contested point in this review's entire sample: Crashlands 2 looks dramatically better than its predecessor, and almost nobody disputes it, positive or negative. "NEW DESIGN! ... the graphical jump from the first game to this one is amazing, the creatures are AWESOME," reads one enthusiastic early review, and even reviewers who go on to mark the game not recommended for other reasons routinely credit the art direction on the way there. That visual step-up sits on top of a crafting-RPG loop reviewers describe as genuinely deep once given a chance — one detailed positive review, written specifically to counter a wave of very short negative reviews, points to "hundreds, maybe thousands" of craftable materials, real build-crafting variety in combat, base-building with numerous styles, and "a decent story" as evidence the game rewards patience beyond its rockier opening hours.

Two specific launch complaints, not a vague pile-on

Read the negative sample closely and two concrete, recurring problems emerge rather than generic dissatisfaction. The first concerns controls. Combat in Crashlands 2 leans heavily on a charge-up attack bound to the right trigger, and several reviewers describe this as clunky on PC specifically because of its mobile-first origins — one reviewer reports that even after remapping controls in the menu, core functions like item selection stay "perma-bound to RT," a genuine usability complaint rather than a matter of taste. Another puts it bluntly: "the game relies waaaaay too heavily on the right trigger for everything... that's way too much button travel." This is a different, more specific critique than ordinary "controls feel bad" complaints, and it's raised by enough independent reviewers with enough consistent detail to treat as a real design friction point at launch, whatever refinements later patches may have made.

The second concerns dialogue volume. Crashlands' original charm leaned heavily on its comic writing, and the sequel doubled down — arguably too far, according to a meaningful slice of this review's negative sample. "Dev heard [that the first game's dialogue was funny] and decided to waaaaaaaay overcompensate," reads one 72-vote review, describing "40+ text boxes" and resorting to spamming the skip button just to progress. Another, more measured review calls the game "drowning in unnecessary dialogue," specifically distinguishing this from disliking the humour itself — the complaint is about volume and pacing, not tone. A non-native English speaker's review adds a related, practical point: heavy text volume compounds when English isn't a reviewer's first language, making an already dialogue-dense game harder going for a wider audience than the original required.

The predecessor comparison cuts both ways

Seventeen of the 46 negative reviews read for this piece explicitly measure the sequel against the original Crashlands, and most of that group reads it as a step down — citing slower pacing, more grind, and a sense that the sequel traded some of the original's tightness for scale. "I beat Crashlands 1," reads one, "played this one for 6 hours and didn't have any interest in playing further... overly grindy and very linear." That's a real, specific pattern worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as reflexive nostalgia.

But it isn't the whole story even among longtime fans, and this review's positive sample makes that clear. One detailed, 25-vote review argues precisely the opposite case: "even on PC Crashlands 1 felt like a mobile game port. The sequel is an entirely different story; the graphics and animations are vastly improved, the gameplay is much improved." Another reviewer with over 200 hours describes the sequel as "a solid step up from the original" specifically in equipment and combat variety. Read together, the predecessor-comparison split in this review's sample looks less like a consensus regression and more like a genuine, evenly-argued disagreement about where the sequel spent its added scope — some players wanted more of the original's tight pacing, others wanted exactly the bigger, more polished game they got.

What the numbers say about how far players get

Steam's achievement data offers a useful third data point alongside the two review camps. Across 40 achievements, the easiest sits at 75.5% but the median is just 12.45%, a fairly steep curve consistent with the grind and pacing complaints raised in the negative sample — a real number of players who start strong don't necessarily push through to the game's later content. That's not unusual for a long-form crafting RPG, but it does corroborate rather than contradict the "gets stale" and "too slow and grindy" complaints raised by several reviewers who otherwise praised the game's opening hours.

A genuinely unusual level of post-launch commitment

Whatever friction existed at launch, Butterscotch Shenanigans has kept working on Crashlands 2 at a pace few studios this size sustain. Major content updates landed in May 2025 (a Compendium feature), June 2025 (a Hardcore mode), and September 2025 ("The Overflow"), with Korean localisation added in December and a steady stream of hotfixes running through at least April 2026, more than a year past release. That track record is worth weighing against launch-week criticism specifically, since a meaningful share of this review's negative sample is dated to the game's first two weeks, before any of that additional support existed.

Final Verdict

Crashlands 2 succeeds at the things a sequel to a beloved game most needs to get right — a genuine, dramatic visual upgrade and a crafting-combat loop with real depth for players who give it time — while stumbling at launch on two specific, well-documented problems: mobile-first controls that frustrated a real share of PC players, and a dialogue-heavy script that outpaced what the original's fans signed up for. Whether the predecessor comparison lands as praise or criticism depends heavily on what a given player wanted more of, and this review's sample shows genuine, well-argued voices on both sides rather than a one-sided verdict. What isn't in dispute is the studio's follow-through: over a year of substantial, continued support has narrowed the gap between the game that launched and the game available today, which makes now a considerably better time to buy in than April 2025 was.