FortressCraft Chapter 1 has been released for 240 Microsoft Points on the Xbox Live Indie Games section of the XBL Marketplace. It has been released to some controversy, with some people charging it’s an attempt to cash in on the popularity of MineCraft (which is itself credited by some, accusingly, of having been inspired by a game called Infiniminer). The author of FortressCraft, for his part, credits yet another game, Dwarf Fortress, as a key inspiration for his game.
FortressCraft’s supporters, however, point out that it is a nicer looking game than MineCraft in addition to having a somewhat different feature-set. FortressCraft is also undeniably more reasonably priced, at about 1/7th of Minecraft’s price.
But is it a good game? The WMD review will have to wait until a day when FortressCraft is no longer well represented in the top-50 lists on the Xbox Dashboard, as per my self-appointed rules for the blog.
In the meantime, the author of FortressCraft asked that the following note be passed along about a potentially crippling bug that has been identified and won’t be patched for at least a week:
“Please try and tell people about the big bug tho – if you go into a multiplayer game, it loses your single player save. I’ve been suggesting a work around of using a USB stick for multiplayer games. It’s resolved locally, but I can’t get it onto the market place before the 17th of April. I am horrified that people might lose their awesome worlds, and I’m telling EVERYONE to pass this info on! :(”
Click here to download “FortressCraft Chapter 1”, and then please come back after playing to rate the game.
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Writings of Mass Deduction 
“The WMD review will have to wait until a day when FortressCraft is no longer well represented in the top-50 lists on the Xbox Dashboard, as per my self-appointed rules for the blog.”
Then let me say that I hope you never, EVER, review this game.
LOL, I was really, really confused upon first reading your comment since you appeared to be the game’s developer. Then I thought it through. :)
It’s gonna be a while for that review. Fortresscraft has been no. 1 in the indie games best sellling chart and has nearly 5000 ratings. Rip off or not, there’s no denying this game can attribute it’s success to minecraft. Congrats to the dev! Goodness knows XBLIG needs more success. I’ll be buying it myself once I get some cash.
All these months on, FortressCraft is still very well represented in the charts. And with good reason! I think as long as you can remember the childhood joy of just trying to build something awesome out of cardboard boxes or spare furniture, you can enjoy FortressCraft.
For me, it was “Well now I’m playing, what do I do? …wait, some of these blocks look like spaceship textures. I could build a space station house! And make it float! And…shape it like a big tower! With an observatory and a roof garden!” That’s the fun of this game – rediscovering the child within who thinks a floating space station house would be the coolest thing in the world.