Your assistant's name is JuiceBox
Sitting somewhere between Minecraft: Java Edition and Don't Starve, crafting-and-adventuring-survival-game Crashlands is impressive in many respects. The premise is immediately engaging thanks to some humorous writing; the early game strikes a comfortable balance between tutorials and discovered gameplay; it has cross-platform cloud saves, so you can play it on damn near anything; and the game itself is pretty fun, or at least it starts out that way.
But there are two things that made me tire of Crashlands after just a couple of hours:
(1) Combat is boring. There isn't much in the way of tactics: at least as far as I played, none of the secondary weapon options were nearly as important as just continuing to hit something with your main weapon. And although enemies often telegraph their attacks, there are no dodges or parries. You can try to walk away from an enemy's attack, and then re-engage it, but doing this with a mouse is fidgety and tedious.
Ultimately, combat comes down to who has the bigger offense and defense stats. Which forms a poor combo with my second complaint:
(2) The overwhelming influence of randomness on equipment strength. All of your weapons and armor pieces are crafted, but at the time of crafting, they're granted randomly-selected attributes of randomly-determined quality. Sometimes you'll get exceptionally lucky and make an "Excellent" piece of armor that makes combat a cinch. Other times you'll get an "Acceptable" item that hardly offers any resistance or bonus effects.
If you made an item that turned out to be shitty, you can salvage it and get some of the materials back; but it won't be enough to make another one, so you'll need to get back out there and grind more materials before you can try crafting it again.
The shallow combat means that your primary goal is crafting good items -- and the randomness of crafting turns the game primarily into a grind for materials.
It's a shame, because the premise and presentation of Crashlands is really compelling; but after only a couple hours, its gameplay just became too dull for me.
Better than: Don't Starve
Not as good as: Factorio
Comparable with: Terraria, sans multiplayer