Recent reviews by n.n

It's a beautiful world (stunning meadows, forests, sunsets, critters frolicking, etc) that feels organic and alive.
The game respects your time by making resources not too difficult to gather and also recoverable if you build a building wrong and want to reconfigure it. It lets you progress at your own pace, and lets you do what you want to do, whether it's exploring, managing a base, raiding tombs, fighting bosses, fighting regular creatures, decorating, sailing the seas, etc. Having friends and fam fighting, exploring, building next to you has been amazing. Portable players between servers is quite interesting -- so you can visit friends' worlds. Feels like the best of Don't Starve Together and Raft put together, and then some.

I find this game to be tremendously enjoyable and quite relaxing, at least on "easy" level, where you can take in the sights, build a big boat, and tinker with research.

My last experience in this genre (co-operative survival) was Don't Starve Together, and I must say... Raft excels at several areas in comparison: (1) drudgery of collecting basic resources can be automated and scaled up (e.g. collection nets to automate wood/plastic/leaf collection, whereas in DS:T, you're still chopping trees by hand 300 days into the game), (2) the build menu is sensibly organized (different sized structures are grouped together) and user friendly (can build pre-requisite items directly from the crafting recipe without switching pages), (3) the game is not based on traveling back and forth over the same old terrain, (4) items from higher tech levels are not inordinately hard to build (compared to lacking Gears in DS:T) . In summary, the game feels respectful of my time, yielding pleasant new experiences without a big focus on grinding and drudgery. Beautiful coral reefs, too.

My only gripe so far is that framerates on my laptop (not a powerhouse by any means) are too slow to fight the shark.