Eko Software’s latest downloadable title ‘How to Survive’ is a curious proposition. An isometric Survival horror game that places just as much, if not more emphasis on survival as it does on the horror.
Think of it as a light mixture of Lost in Blue, Dead Island and a little bit of Diablo and you can’t go far wrong.
Stranded on a small archipelago of four islands after the boat you were travelling on sinks, players are tasked with figuring out How to Survive, battling against thirst, starvation, fatigue and the region’s incredibly clingy locals, who want nothing more than to get inside your skull and feast on the juicy brain meats found within.
Luckily for you, a crazy Russian survivalist called Kovac has taken up residence on one of the nearby islands and has created a handy guide – Kovacs Rules that covers all the finer points of how to survive this less than hospitable tropical paradise, unfortunately for you the guide is in several hundred pieces scattered to the four winds, well, each of the games four areas. Your key to surviving is simple, find the missing pages and escape by plane, because for some unknown reason you can only travel between islands by boat but not escape on the water. Maybe there’re some massive mutant sharks stopping you!
Although this paper chase sounds like a massive pain in the arse, within the game itself finding pages feels surprisingly organic and can become quite addictive as every new entry in the book is accompanied by a fairly insightful and genuinely funny new short narrated by the crazy Russian himself.
In the early stages of the games they’re used as a mechanism to gradually introduce new game play elements. From the basics such as how to poke a zombie with a pointed stick to more complex subjects like the dangers of raw meat and how best to cook it,
Kovac also pops up at various points throughout the game to help your would-be survivor when the going gets tough to crack a few skulls or help drive the incredibly simple plot forward.
As well as hunting for new pages of the guide you’ll spend most of your time helping out other survivors by finding things for them, killing zombies or checking on their friends and loved ones.
The mission structure is very similar to Dead Island or Diablo in its execution you’ll stumble across people in your travels, help them out, crack a few heads, be gifted some XP and something useful for your troubles and move on. The only problem is that there is no variation in the missions at all, every last one is a fetch quest given by the interchangeable NPCs. Go to A, get B, return to C and repeat. For six hours.
Speaking of a lack of variation, the four islands themselves offer almost no difference in scenery either, each being a slightly rearranged version of the same mix of sparsely populated shanty towns and dry shrub land.
That may have made the game sound a little bit more of a chore than I intended, because despite these niggles the moment to moment game play is actually a lot of fun thanks mostly to the game’s simple but robust crafting system which enables you to construct weapons, armour and aid from the piles of junk that litter each island.
Things start out simply enough, you’ll find a stick to smack the zombies on the head with, then you might find some flint, which you can then combine with it in exactly the same way as you would herbs in Resident Evil to create a rudimentary hand axe. Fill an empty bottle with petrol and combine it with a rag and you have a handy Molotov cocktail. Take a motor, a chain and an oil can and you can make yourself a chainsaw, just remember to keep it topped up with petrol.
There are new recipes to be found in every nook, cranny and abandoned hut and I found it to be just as fun simply experimenting to see what combined with what.
Once you’ve made yourself a decent weapon, it’s clobbering time. Combat is pretty simple but still a lot of fun, pressing RB will let your chosen character swing their axe or fire a ranged weapon, holding it down will either wind up for a stronger hit or line up a headshot for an instant kill. Aiming is mostly automatic but you can fine tune it by using the right stick.
Wear a zombie down and eventually a prompt will appear above their head to perform a finisher. These are often quite humorous, there’s something about watching a zombie get suplexed that never gets old.
Like Dead Island every zombie you kill will help you to level up. Each time you gain a new level you’ll be given allowed to unlock a new skill on the skill tree which help you create better weapons, better gear or helps you with your day-to-day needs, each of the game’s three characters has a slightly different skill tree too, Jack can make scopes to improve the accuracy of his ranged weapons, Abbey can create incendiary arrows and Kenji can make himself a crossbow.
Each of the games three characters, on paper at least, have different stats as well, Jack is stronger with melee weapons and can take slightly more damage, Abbey is more athletic and therefore can sprint for longer and Kenji is a better shot so takes less time to line up headshots.
However within the game I didn’t really see much of difference between the characters other than they had different avatars, their differences on the whole making little difference in the long run. Likewise after learning the basics such as lighting fires, the upgrades in each skill tree didn’t feel like they had much impact on the game itself and you never really get the feeling that your character is getting any more powerful.
In fact with the introduction of more powerful zombies later in the game like the Left 4 Dead-esque Berserkers, think tanks, and fat zombies which explode like boomers, it feels like your character is getting worse at surviving instead of better.
This is compounded by the fact that sources of food and water become harder to find, thus your character’s ability to run and fight become horrifically nerfed as you have a tough time keeping your character healthy. So even if you manage to find a shelter your character can rest in, chances are you won’t be able to clear out the zombies that infest it because you will more than likely die in the process.
As such the end game becomes a little more tedious at times than it necessarily needed to be. Which is a crying shame too because there are some fantastic ideas present in the game when they’re not conspiring to screw you over in the worst possible way.
For example the day and night cycle is a brilliant idea, and for the best part creates a nice sense of tension as the sun goes down and the horrible bastards that only come out at night because they hate the light of begin to creep in the shadows and attack. Your flashlight and the light of a campfire fast become your best friends. The only problem is that through pure bloody bad luck in one playthrough I completely buggered up my characters sleep cycle so that he rested through the day and only ventured out at night. This made the game in some ways a bit more interesting, but needlessly harder in others because your character will only rest when their tiredness gauge is almost empty.
It’s also important to note that you don’t need to go through the campaign alone if you don’t want to as it also supports both local and online co-op. This changes the tone of the game completely, from tense and isolated experience to a buddy movie in which the two main protagonists run around a zombie infested island and beat to death anything that moves. It basically, turns the game from Dawn of the Dead to Shawn of the Dead.
It’s not worse or better, it’s just, you know, different.
Once you’ve finished battling through the main campaign there are also eight challenge maps to contend with. Each of these nails hard missions were a ton of fun in both single and multiplayer and ranged from straight forward missions like getting to a helicopter without dying, to slightly more complex missions, such as assembling and maintaining a chainsaw whilst sawing up hordes of zombies, to completely barmy missions such as beating hundreds of emus to death with a baseball bat.
With its odd mix of influences, dark sense of humour, weirdly addictive game play and unique hook, How to Survive had the potential to be an absolute classic. But sadly it just slightly misses the mark thanks to a shallow levelling system, odd difficulty spikes and one note missions mean that How to Survive isn’t a great game merely a good one.
