Hardcore Gamer checked out Cube World:

Review: Cube World

The map extends forever in all directions, an endless world of potential adventure.  Its blocky hills and valleys, mountains, volcanoes, deserts and oceans teem with monsters guarding loot in various forms, waiting for a questing hero to put it to good use.  Friendly bands of warriors wander the landscape, giving advice and sometimes helping in combat, and the occasional town or settlement provides a safe spot to get down to crafting better gear.  The wilds of Cube World are a massive series of lands filled with quests and exploration for the self-motivated adventurer, with the small disclaimer that each new area is the start of another quest to rise from what’s effectively level 1.

Cube World is a cheerful blue-skied open-world action/RPG where you’re free to go in whichever direction catches your fancy at any time.  Traveling is easy if you don’t mind walking, but at the start the character you create is incredibly weak.  The game starts with a choice of race, gender, character class, and some options for designing just the right head, and then leaves you free to do whatever you’d like to do next.  A big part of Cube World is figuring it out, which can be nice when you’ve got a few systems down and significantly less helpful at the start when there’s not a single hint as to how to deal with a land crawling with monsters that can take you apart in a few hits.

[...]

Closing Comments:

There was a huge expectation put on Cube World since its alpha, and while things have changed significantly since then the resulting game is almost exactly as promised: a big open adventure to explore at your leisure, with no pressure beyond what you bring to it.  Whether going it alone or teaming up with friends there’s plenty to chase after or you can grab a bench in a nearby village and chat as the in-game day slowly drifts by.  Getting started and learning to first survive and then have fun doing it takes more experimentation than it should, but there’s a consistent internal logic to the game’s systems that eventually comes through, making for a game that always has a new adventure waiting wherever you care to look.  The rise and fall and rise again of the progression system may not be for everyone, but for those who recognize that the real treasure is the friends we made along the way the quest to become a hero, Cube World grants the opportunity to do that in an endless succession of new and adventurous lands.

Score: 3.5/5

After 4 years with no update Cube World now has a Steam page and is aiming for a September/October release according to this tweet.

What is Cube World?

Cube World is a voxel-based action RPG with a focus on exploration. It takes place in a procedurally generated fantasy world made up of entirely of cubes.

Features

• Choose between four different classes: Warrior, Ranger, Mage, Rogue.
• Action-based combat with dodging, aiming, combos, special skills and more.
• Explore a nearly infinite, procedurally generated fantasy world.
• Plan your next adventure with the 3D voxel world map. Scroll and zoom everywhere to find your next destination!
• Craft weapons, armor, potions, elixirs and food and more from ingredients found throughout the world.
• Tame pets that fight along your side and can be used as mounts.
• Non-linear, open world gameplay. Solve quests, help residents, fight huge monsters, explore ancient dungeons! It's all up to you!
• Discover procedurally generated lore and learn about ancient civilizations and magic artifacts.
• Retrieve unique magic artifacts to level up and improve your skills.
• Earn gold to buy items or to book an eagle flight to new lands.
• Cube World's unique per-land progression system makes finding loot, solving quests and clearing dungeons rewarding and exciting over and over again.
• Use your hang glider to take to the skies or explore the oceans with your boat.
• Find magic items to enter secret areas and to support you on your journey.
• Play solo singleplayer or join your friends in coop-online-multiplayer.

While roaming through Twitter, Eye noticed that the developer of Cube World has some 50 screenshots linked to his Twitter account. You can check them out here.

After quite some silence the developer of Cube World has put a piece of music from the game on soundcloud, which also shos us that he is still working on it.

Thanks Eye.

Developer Picroma has released a new video preview of the quest system for Cube World. It has been a while since I posted any news about the game so enjoy.

This video gives a first preview of the new quest system that we're currently working on. It's still work in progress and we're still adding more variations and content

Kotaku has a new article about Cube World and why fans are worried about it.

So what's been going on? Has development stopped? Where is the project right now? Is Wollay, the developer, even alive? Fans have all sorts of questions like these.

The short answer is that the game is still being worked on—we'll get to that in a second. First, let's do a recap.

It all started back in 2011, when Wolfram von Funck, aka Wollay, posted the first screenshots of a charming-looking role-playing game that promised players a vast, procedurally generated world. Cube World, he called it. Lots of people took notice—the project looked promising, especially since it was taking inspiration from great games like Zelda and Minecraft. Still, despite the clamor from fans, it still felt like kind of a hushed affair—Wollay repeatedly said he didn't know when the game will release. It wasn't until 2012 that another person joined the team: his wife, Sarah von Funck, who is contributing as a coder, designer and concept artist on the project. Heck, we still don't know what the official name of this thing will be—"Cube World" is just a fill-in for now, according to the developer. Last year, Luke Plunkett said that Cube World was "quietly" becoming his most anticipated game of 2012, reflective of how low-key the game's marketing and PR has been.

Updates on the progress of the game weren't unheard of, of course—based on his old development blog, Wollay would periodically give updates that included new screenshots, videos, and hints of upcoming plans. Most would come once a month, if that, with updates ramping up in 2013—which is when a playable alpha of the game was planned. The catch: players would have to pay for the privilege of early access. This is where things got tricky.

EDGE has a preview for Cube World calling the game a procedurally generated voxel world ripe for exploration.

It’s two years since development began, and much has changed. Combat has been overhauled, with the ability to lock on to enemies removed because of Von Funck’s love of Monster Hunter. A hard-drive failure did for much of his codebase, meaning the entire engine had to be rewritten from scratch – no small task for a lone programmer, but there are no regrets. “I’m actually glad that I coded my own engine,” he tells us. “I love to have full control over everything.” Everything, that is, except the lie of this beautiful, blocky, randomly crafted land.

I have rounded up various links for the alpha released Cube World. It's a voxel-based exploration RPG  being developed by one man. Here is the webpage.

Up first we have an Alpha review from Entertainment Buddha giving the game a 8/10.

The Awesome: Pets, Weapon customization, Beautiful yet simple scenery, Scale of the map The Not so Awesome: Limited crafting options, No tutorials for game mechanics, Hard for newcomers

Cube world is a paid alpha that contains a lot of game for such early development and speaks volumes for this type of business model, especially after recent problems with Kickstarter projects. It’s relatively cheap and incredibly fun in multiplayer; though expect to have a few rough first hours getting your bearings in the game.

Up next we have two previews.

JumptoGamer

On the surface, Cube World is a very simple game, but under the hood it is a complex and feature rich experience, one which I would recommend to any gamer, no matter what your preferred Genre is.

If you are interested in Cube World still, but unsure whether to take the leap of faith and buy it, I can only suggest watching some YouTube videos and checking out the feature list and what is planned on the website.

GamerChatter

Cube World while very similar in looks to Minecraft, that and the levels being procedurally generated, is where the similarities end. Cube World is more about combat. You able to select for four different classes: Warrior, Rogue, Mage and Ranger. After the character creation, you are free to do whatever you please. Though most enemies will cut you down pretty fast when you start out. One thing I haven’t been able to try out yet is co-op which could make the game much easier.

And finally we have an impression article from Games.on.net.

Cube World is stupidly gorgeous and the voxel graphics look just amazing, especially as you explore different biomes and watch the sun rise and set, or as you scamper through a cave with your lantern out. But there’s just no instruction at the moment on what to do or how to do it, and the game’s mechanics (again, in this alpha state) just boil down to “let’s go and murder these adorable animals together”.

As the game keeps updating and new features are added, Cube World will eventually shape itself into something very special. It’s got a lot of promise and it’s a heap of fun to play, but without another person around it quickly becomes very clearly shallow. If you haven’t got a friend who would be keen to pixelate out with you, it might be worth leaving it for a while.