Crafting requires time, sometimes hours or days, but for most items, you can do other things while crafting goes on in the background. You queue up your work, then go out and adventure, and you're informed when you're done crafting. A few items require your character to be in a workshop, though of course you can log off and not lose time.

Fallen Earth does have some flaws. While the landscapes and textures are very nice and immersive, character animations, both of humans and animals, are stiff and suffer from clipping problems. At times, they look like solid plastic toys being dragged around by invisible strings.

Gameplay is more important than graphics, but graphics do matter. The flexibility of the character system can sometimes seem to be too great; while you can't excel at everything, you can be pretty good at most things, which means there's little sense of having valuable or unique skills.

Flipping between an FPS-style combat mode and a more typical point-and-click non-combat mode may not be intuitive for everyone. While there's plenty of freedom to wander, there's also a sense that it doesn't matter; you're likely to find the same kinds of enemies, resources, and quests in every part of a large area. While advanced regions of the game have many different kinds of terrain, the starter region is realistically brown, grey, and desiccated, and it can be a long time before you see anything else.

Fallen Earth began as a standard monthly subscription RPG, underwent a fairly rocky launch period, and transitioned to a free-to-play model, which seems to be successful, judging from the activity in the game's starter zones.