Cubic Odyssey

A voxel space adventure with real ambition

Cubic Odyssey sends players on a galactic journey across vibrant, blocky planets, crafting tools, building vehicles, and fighting back a spreading corruption called the Red Darkness while uncovering the mysteries behind an ancient, dying universe. It's an ambitious, genre-blending pitch — part Minecraft-style digging and building, part No Man's Sky-style planet-hopping exploration — and based on the available English-language review sample of 1,331 reviews — 1,002 positive, 329 negative, landing at an overall Mostly Positive rating — the single-player core of that pitch has landed well for a meaningful share of its audience. "I've only played a short time but I can tell this is going to be one of those 1000+ hour games. Everything about it is satisfying - the progression, the building, the digging, the exploration, the weapons, the vehicles, the story, etc. It just feels right, and if you like other 'block style' games like Minecraft, Vintage Story, etc., you'll love this one," one enthusiastic reviewer writes.

That enthusiasm is real and specific, but it comes with an important caveat that shows up repeatedly across the positive sample: many of the game's happiest reviewers explicitly frame their enjoyment as conditional on playing alone. "So far I'm enjoying it, the negative reviews seem to be about co-op/mp, but I'm not bothered about multiplayer so for me the game's ok," one reviewer writes plainly, a pattern that recurs often enough to suggest the review sample is effectively split along a single, predictable line: how much a given player cares about playing with friends.

Co-op that simply doesn't work as advertised

By far the single most consistent, most heavily upvoted complaint in this entire review sample concerns co-op, and the complaints are specific and technical rather than vague dissatisfaction. "Game has potential but the multiplayer/co-op experience is horrible. Only the host can progress the quest as well as do certain actions like owning vehicles and ships. Was met with a 'only the host can do this action' a few times," the most heavily upvoted review in the entire sample states. A separate, similarly heavily upvoted review lays out the practical consequence in stark terms: "Co-op is host dependent, makes the experience unbearable for my friend, can't progress, can't break chests, stations, doors or pretty much anything man made block. Bought it for the co-op and as of right now this game is not worth it."

What compounds this complaint significantly is that the developer apparently promised a fix and, according to multiple reviewers, didn't deliver it on the stated timeline. "Do not buy this game if you want co-op. It does not work. I was so excited for this game's launch, because co-op looked fun. They put out a roadmap of fixes and I waited, but that has come and gone and co-op still broken, maybe even more so. If you are not the host of the session, you simply cannot do so many things, including access the same materials, the same story progress, and even essential items to the game," one reviewer writes. A separate reviewer itemizes several more specific co-op gaps beyond the core progression-lock issue: "Basic features are missing from co-op: 1. If a player joins you and their game crashes it won't save and all of their progress made will be lost. 2. Host player can have multiple hover vehicles but only 1 out at a time meaning you can't share your extra vehicles with other people. 3. No way to gift vehicles to players." That level of specific, itemized detail across multiple independent reviews indicates a genuinely broken system rather than a matter of preference or difficulty.

A resource economy several reviewers call actively punishing

Beyond co-op, the most substantive complaint concerns resource balance, and it's raised with unusually concrete, quantified examples. "Resource cost is very unbalanced. It took me 12 hours of gameplay to craft an item only to have it destroyed in a matter of seconds by a low level enemy. The cost to fix it was the same as it was to craft it. You can craft turrets to defend your base (again, the resource cost to make them is way too high considering the time it takes to get them) and they are completely useless," one reviewer writes, describing a specific, reproducible frustration rather than general difficulty complaints. A separate reviewer identifies a related energy-management problem: "Energy management is frustrating — you have to craft or repair batteries almost every 20 minutes. Why is the charging station locked so late into the game?" These specific, mechanically-detailed complaints recur often enough to suggest a genuine tuning problem in the crafting and repair economy rather than isolated bad luck.

A separate reviewer draws a sharper comparison to the game's clearest inspirations, arguing the execution doesn't match the ambition: "When you first see the game, you think: Cool, a bastard child of Minecraft and No Man's Sky. But it quickly becomes clear that it's just a rip-off. Both of these games are great in their own way. Cubic Odyssey never comes close to its role models. After a few hours, it becomes clear that this game consists solely of mindless grinding." A separate reviewer, having tried the earlier free demo, reports a specific disappointment relative to that preview build: "I tried the Demo first, it looked fun and the demo is clearly already an older build then the current, but so far after getting the full game I'm disappointed. Reaching where I ended where I was at the demo I learned that suddenly the fun factor drops considerably."

Genuine, corroborated depth for solo players

Despite the significant complaints, the achievement data offers strong, independent confirmation that there's real, substantial single-player content here for players willing to engage with it. Across 37 total achievements, early milestones like reaching space or acquiring a first ship sit around 55-58% completion, while the hardest, most demanding late-game goals — clearing 50 planets, maxing all skills, reaching level 10 across every class — fall to between 0.5% and 1.3%. That's an exceptionally wide spread, on par with some of the deepest games this lane has covered, and it directly supports the "1000+ hour game" framing from the game's most enthusiastic single-player fans, even as it sits alongside real, specific complaints about balance and repetition from players who pushed further into that same content.

Where this leaves it

Cubic Odyssey offers a genuinely substantial, achievement-verified single-player voxel adventure that a meaningful share of its audience finds deeply satisfying, built on a real, if familiar, foundation of digging, building, and planet-hopping exploration. Its most serious, most widely and specifically reported failure is co-op: a headline feature that reviewers describe, in detailed and independently corroborating terms, as fundamentally broken for anyone who isn't the hosting player, compounded by a developer roadmap for fixes that several reviewers say went unfulfilled. Add a resource economy multiple reviewers call actively punishing and reports of significant save-corruption bugs, and this reads as a game with real depth undermined by launch-quality issues in exactly the feature its marketing leaned on most. Recommended cautiously for solo players specifically drawn to the Minecraft-meets-No-Man's-Sky pitch; avoid entirely if co-op with friends is the primary reason for buying.