here's some quick impressions from about an hour of playing Planet Explorers (which, for this type of game, is nothing really). Planet Explorers is a game much like Terraria, Starbound, or Starforge, where you are dropped on some open world planet and you have to explore, dig and build shit. The idea of these games fascinates me but the lack of objectives usually in them always puts me off, and this is where I hope Planet Explorers will be better.
For one, there is a story mode. I dont know how long it will be or how involved, but for now, it feels like your typical rpg, only instead of them giving youa shovel or a sword to complete your objectives, they give you the blueprints for those things, and you need to craft them yourself before you can complete your objective. Early quests are pretty much tutorial stuff, as the lady you are helping is basically giving you all the basic tools you will need (shovel, pickaxe, weapon etc) while you fetch stuff for her to make medicine for herself and whatnot (get 10 wood and 5 animal fat to build a campfire), much like you would in any mmo.
Crafting interface seems simple enough to use, like I said you get blueprints for stuff and then can build them whenever you want on the fly (for now). From my short time with it I already had a dagger I started with, a axe, a sword and shield, a pickaxe, a shovel, a bed that I found in a box, a torch, an assortment of healing items and a shitload of plants that I harvested. And dirt, because you cant play these games without collecting a bunch of dirt.
The game is in alpha (I thought it was in beta actually) and sometimes it feels very much like a game in alpha. Collision detection is wonky, you right click on stuff to gather or loot but most of the time it wont register, you need to keep clicking, you left click to attack (theres actually some nice combat animations I was surprised) but because the collision detection is wonky it doesnt feel very satisfying, most of the time youre not sure youre hiting something, the world looks great but it seems to be barely populated for now (for example, I had an escort quest where the guy says "protect me from animals because im a doctor!"... we went to the location we had to go, which wasnt exactly close, got what we needed, went back, saw 1 lizard which never even attacked us

), stuff like that. Nothing seems outright broken, just lacks a ton of polish. But it shows a ton of promise dont get me wrong. If they can clean this stuff up it will easily be my favorite of these type of games.
I love how colorful it looks, the world looks great, there seems to be a variety of weird monsters (even tho I barely saw any, the ones I saw looked good, including a giant...rhino...thing just walking around), and if the idea of a rpg / mmo (mmo in the gameplay sense I mean) with terraria style crafting and building is something that sounds appealing to you, give this a shot or at least keep an eye on it while it progresses.
Like I said I only played about an hour to get a sense of it, I didnt build houses or dug my way into oblivion, or made jetpacks and hanggliders and shit you see on screenshots. Besides the story mode there was an adventure mod, which just seemed to dump you on the planet and said "now go do shit I dunno!", and a multiplayer mode which I didnt try.