Survivalist is an isometric 3D sandbox RPG zombie survival game, with great emphasis on the survival aspect. You begin the game as Joe Wheeler who has been hiding in an underground bunker in an attempt to avoid the spreading zombie virus. Supplies have run out after a year, thus you must venture out and procure food and water in order to keep on living. Simple enough, until you realize that there are zombies running around and civilized life is all but wiped out. What follows next is your daily struggle in the search for food and supplies in order to keep you alive and safe from the hazards of a devastated, zombie-infested, gang-ridden land. This being an open-world game, you are free to roam anywhere you please in the search for more supplies. The further you stray from the safety of your bunker though, the more dangers lurk around every corner.

Survivalist focuses on a more realistic tone to the genre than most games do. While you do have the usual gunning and scavenging aspect as seen in similar games such as DayZ, the core mechanic of Survivalist focuses on community and humanity as a whole. When exploring Survivalist’s desert wasteland setting, you will often come upon other survivors of the zombie uprising. Each encounter can easily shape the outcome of your playthrough as every person you meet has their own personality, relationships, and personal goals and needs. Your actions upon meeting this person can easily determine whether they are a friend or foe, and they will remember your choice as well. Rob a passerby early in the game and later on in your next meeting they will remember your face with a seething look of hatred pointed your way and possibly the barrel of a gun as well. Begin friendly trades with a well-armed group and they will welcome you happily to their camp for further use and trade. The amount of work put into the AI to simulate a living and thriving community among the NPCs was simply amazing to see. The fact that I can slowly work my way into the good graces of a community by buttering up one or two members and see the results of my goodwill spread among the rest of the members left me amazed.

Speaking of community, it is not solely limited to pre-established NPC clans. The option is there to build your own community as well. With enough supplies, manpower and skills, you can build your very own fortress to house yourself and any friends you make on your travels. One key member you will come across very early in the game is a woman named Alice who is a diabetic and requires a daily dose of insulin in order to keep her alive. With her among your group, not only do you need the basic necessities but you also need to procure a regular supply of her medication. In a world devasted by a zombie plague, modern medication such as insulin does not come readily available, with the few caches coming in at a steep price. Do you keep her with you and attempt to save what humanity is left, or do you simply abandon her, leaving her to a grim fate?

In my playthrough, I decided to let her tag along with me and did the best of my abilities to keep her regularly supplied with her much-needed medication. I will have to admit that this hit a lot closer to home than I was expecting from a game. I come from a high-risk group of people for diabetes and my family does have a history of the condition. The fact that I got a small glimpse of what I may have to resort to if the collapse of civilization actually occurred, left me in contemplative silence. Not many games I have played have managed to evoke a feeling like this from me, it is both humbling and frightening when I think about it.

The gameplay itself is broken down into familiar action-rpg style mechanics. You have skills ranging from fitness, guns, farming, and construction. Each one can be leveled up by using that particular skill, with successive levels adding more benefits for your continual survival. More fitness for example can allow you to run further and carry heavier loads; better gun skills will allow you to aim more accurately, taking down zombies with ease. The zombies, while not as deadly as the human threats you may come across, are no pushovers themselves. Zombies in Survivalist come in various strengths which have been thoughtfully color coded as virus strains. The virus strains infecting the undead hosts range from a mildly annoying green, stronger blues, dangerous reds, and a rumored instant-death white. With skills you can manage each one with various difficulty, greens offering the least amount of danger and whites the most. Thankfully all the viruses save for the white strain can be combated with syringes called antigens in order to cure yourself of viral bites. These of course will further add to your list of much needed supplies. Getting bit by a zombie will mean death if the required antigen isn’t applied soon, so always carry a syringe or two while out scavenging.

I have to say I love this game. It’s a robust game filled with moral and physical obstacles while giving a grand look on the narrative of humanity and the choices we make. The graphics, while not the best looking, did the job well of playing out a world devoid of modern civilization. Abandoned towns looked eerie and foreboding, the game’s day/night cycle made you welcome the sun. Zombies looked grotesque and dead as they should; the interface offering multiple views and providing vital info when needed. The music in game added the appropriate amount of atmosphere, some more than others I might add. Having an easy, synthesized guitar track guide you along as you explore the vast desert inexplicably changing to a strange electronica tempo just felt jarring. Thankfully the majority of them fit right in and it didn’t distract me too much from the immersion of the game.

The game is so close to being perfect, it has all the aspects I ever wanted in a survival game as well as adding in zombies and a well-defined “living world”. The sheer depth it offers with the narrative separates itself from the other similarly-themed games. With it’s glowing gameplay and mechanics I do see a rather major problem coming up during the endgame, that problem being a gentle downhill slope into repetitiveness. In my playthough one of my endgame goals was to have at least one survivor with maxed out skills. Once you form a basic community and you have people cordoned off and specialized to do certain work, you begin using those members solely for their best skill and rarely anything else. I had one member who was the main builder of the group while I was a skilled marksman and scavenger. I would need to grind construction skills with useless buildings and dwindling supplies just to be able to “win”. Thankfully I have yet to experience this part of the game, perhaps it may not be as bad as I think when I eventually do get to that point. Either way this is a cause of concern for me as using timesinks in order to win does not seem enjoyable in the least.

Despite that, I think that Survivalist is great beyond all expectations and it has become my favorite game among all the titles being offered on XBLIG. It is nearly perfect and it outshines any other title I have played with the survival-horror-sim aspect. If you want a great survival game for a low price, get Survivalist as soon as you can. I guarantee it will keep you busy for hours. While it may not be as eye-opening to others as it was to me, I assure it will give you much food for thought.

Simply amazing.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

Other reviews:

Survivalist on theXBLIG

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Have you ever been playing a game and thought out loud to yourself, “I can make something better than this piece of junk”, or “I can easily make something as awesome as this”? Ever wanted to make your own video game but lack the creativity or knowledge of today’s thingamabob-gadgets and do-hickeys? Well, it is your lucky day. Greenheart Games have released their flagship title appropriately named Game Dev Tycoon, a business sim where you start and run your very own game company.

 In Game Dev Tycoon you begin your journey at the early years of video games. You begin by giving your company a name and by creating your games on a single workstation in your garage. From this humble origin you must now make a name for yourself in the world of game development. Do not worry about about the technical aspects of the game-making process, creating games has been simplified in Game Dev Tycoon. It is as easy as picking a game topic, its genre, and the target platform and you are on your way to creating the next hit.

As the owner, you call the shots as to what game is created; that werewolf RPG game you had rattling around in your brain? You can make it a reality. Zombie romance sim, government action-adventure, transport RPGs? Sure, why not. Mix and match to your adventurous whims.

Actual development is divided into stages where you adjust sliders in order to focus on certain aspects such as dialogue, graphics, sound, and so on. Care must be given to this as each stage will affect how well your game fares out compared to other games of that genre. Action games heavy in dialogue and RPGs lacking in story or graphics may fare poorly in the market, so you must use experience and your best judgement in order to make the game focused on what is most important to that specific game. Not everything will work, but it is fun to experiment with obscure mixes of genres and subjects. You never know what may become the next smash hit.

Every start up begins somewhere

Your options are very limited at the beginning, with only your garage as your office, yourself as the sole employee, and only the early infancy of computer technology as your platform. As time progresses you will gain new platforms and technology to work with as companies form and begin to release new consoles. As well as new tech, you gain experience with each new game released, new tech to research and, hopefully, some income from your game sales for which you can use to fund more projects or expand your company.

Speaking of platforms, the timeline in Game Dev Tycoon develops much like the real-life game industry. As the gaming industry grows, parodied versions of companies such as Ninvento will release game consoles and even form rivalries with other industry players such as Vena. Early on you gain access to consoles such as the Ninvento TES and the Vena Oasis for your game development. Those names sound familiar? These thinly-veiled parodies of real-life companies were a great source of amusement for myself. It was fun trying to guess what the next console or company would be named.

Cleverly “disguised” company rivals

If you have managed your money and releases well enough you will eventually be able to move into bigger and better offices. These offer a much larger workspace than a dingy garage and will allow you to hire employees and expand your company. As you grow even more you can expand even further into the industry by adding your own research department or develop your very own console. This all adds up to more tech, more development options, and more income. The amount of options available to you is simple astounding and frankly a little overwhelming.

I have played other similar game dev simulation games in the past such as Game Dev Story, but GreenHeart Games’ adaptation offers a bit more “meat”, so to speak. The game continued to impress me at each turn and gave me a few chuckles along the way. Very few issues come up with this game other than some frame rate slowdown at the later stages of the game, but it is bearable and it didn’t bother me so much.

I adore this game. It caters to my whims as an aspiring game developer and it just simply oozes with charm. If you want to fulfill your dreams as the head of your own game company or like business sims, give Game Dev Tycoon a go. You won’t be disappointed.

I wholeheartedly agree with their reviews

I would have to agree with the above rating. Simply marvelous.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

Buy or demo the game at GreenHeart Games

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Faster. Higher. Stronger. Not only was it the motto of all Olympians from earlier this summer, it’s also the creed by which players will create their empire in Smooth Operators: Call Center Chaos.

This indie Xbox strategy game from Andreas Heydeck Games challenges players to mold a lean, mean, support center machine. While it’s possible to achieve greatness after a handful of hours, at some point players may be questioning whether they’re ruling the game or the game is ruling them.

Smooth Operators builds upon a tried-and-true formula of micromanagement and patience. In this particular case, it’s building up a call center by creating a self-supporting ecosystem. In order to make money, it’s necessary to build operation rooms and hire call-takers, telemarketers, and fill other similar roles to help meet daily quotas for clients. In order to keep those employees happy and up-and-running, players need to create service rooms and hire janitors to clean their workstations, as well as hire IT staff to fix their absurdly fragile computers.

Creating a thriving business is not all about hiring grunt workers. In order to reach for the skies – quite literally – the solution is to bring in a variety of management staff to open up new opportunities over time. Of course it’s necessary to feed everyone and allow them a chance to use the restroom, so those types of buildings are important as well. It’s quite possible that the most crucial piece of the puzzle is developing an efficient transportation system within the building. Creating a logjam keeps employees from returning to their desk and earning money, and it can also upset them to the point they eventually quit. There’s a solid tutorial that introduces players to the roles and functions of each of these pieces. It doesn’t take too long to learn how these parts all work together, but it can take a bit of struggling and patience to learn how to balance everything out.

As with similar games like Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, there’s almost always a business deficiency the player will need to overcome. Perhaps there’s not enough of a certain kind of call-maker on a particular contract, or the elevator system gets too crowded causing employees to miss their daily quotas. Maybe the player’s waiting on their Account Manager to land them a higher volume contract to start using some of the idle employees. The concept here is the same as seen in a lot of RPGs: the dangling carrot. The idea that once the player overcomes some obstacle, it’s going to be smooth sailing keeps them reaching for that goal. While that can allow the player to reach a new, higher plateau, it also produces an even newer, shinier carrot. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with this system. I absolutely love the two titles from Nimblebit and have been playing Sim games for years. I even continued playing Smooth Operators long after most players would’ve gotten their money’s worth and walked away. It’s the best one of these small studio micromanagement games I’ve played, and the addictive quality is second to none.

Smooth Operators: guaranteed to be your best experience ever with tech support.

I feel like Smooth Operators can be played in one of two ways, at least early on. Players can manage every bit of their business by keeping the clock slow and watching trends and inefficiences in their employees’ movement patterns and schedules. Or, in a very Rube Goldberg-esque manner players can set everything up, ramp up the clock, and watch how everything unfolds at hyper-speed. It’s really up to the player to determine how involved they want to get in the action. While I’m sure the former method provides successful results, I veered towards the latter, more hands-off method. I was able to achieve the desired results, though it may have taken longer. It’s nice that the game doesn’t require an extreme amount of vigilance, though some may point to that making the game too easy.

With no clearly definable end goal though, playing Smooth Operators will eventually lead to player fatigue. There are a number of reward-based objectives that also earn players extra money. These may offer an extra incentive for completionists to continue long after the objective money has ceased to be useful, but they only go so far. Although I have some gripes with the efficiency of the pathfinding logic for some of the characters – I’m looking at you, janitors – the biggest problem is certainly the endgame. The game just doesn’t scale well once players have put a healthy amount of time into it. There will inevitably come a point where all daily contracts are being fulfilled and no one’s quitting because everything has been made as efficient as possible through the purchase of better transportation methods and upgrading employees and buildings. The map has the potential for 40 floors of rooms with multiple columns, but players will likely never need more than a tenth of that to build an unstoppable juggernaut. I’m not sure what the point is for all that space since it’s not likely to ever get used. Up until players reach that point of continued success though, I think the game is a blast.

Incentive-based objectives may keep some players going after the game starts playing itself.

It’s difficult to say with any degree of conviction that every gamer should try Smooth Operators. I think it’s built for individuals who love a high degree of micromanagement or for casual gamers who get their kicks via similar games on Facebook or iOS devices. While it doesn’t quite reach the polished heights of a big budget SimTower, a game credited with inspiring this one, I think it matches or surpasses the best of the casual empire-building games currently available on the market. Its charming, cartoonish visual and audio presentation only lend to the appeal with some of the music feeling very Sim City-esque. It’s certainly a unique experience for the Xbox platform, and I think it’s a great choice to represent the indie development community as part of the Indie Games Uprising event. For 80 MSP ($1), I think most gamers would be hard-pressed to find a more addictive experience that they can play for a few minutes or for a few hours at a time.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Additional Smooth Operators: Call Center Chaos coverage:

Review on theXBLIG.com

Review on Clearance Bin Review

Review on IndieGamerChick 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Oil Magnate has a lot going for it. For a start, it’s one of painfully, worryingly few indie (or mainstream, for that matter) management/strategy sims on the Xbox 360.

The premise is pretty straightforward. You are an aspiring oil baron who must assess different prospective drill sites, buy the land and then fill your drums with black liquid gold, all while three rivals do the same and try to outdo you by fair means or foul. If that sounds exciting, this game is for you. If not, it might still be for you as long you don’t fall asleep during the tutorial. Although there’s still the matter of… No, I don’t want to mention that.

At the outset you can choose from four ‘missions’, which are basically definitions of the victory conditions. In one you must invest a specified amount of money over time, in another you must drive all your competitors out of business, and so on. The details of these missions can be tweaked, allowing you to make the game is easy or as difficult as you choose. You can adjust how much money you start with, how long you have to achieve the objective, and just how high the target figure is.

So far, so good. It’s all very professional. You can even choose the appearance of your office from a few options. This attention to detail is reminiscent of the classic management sims, the Sim City and Civilization series.

Traditionally, sim-type games don’t fit very well with consoles thanks to the clunkiness of navigating menus and maps with a controller. Playing Sim City 2000 on the Super Nintendo was like trying to eat noodles by gripping one strand at a time between a pair of fresh haddock. I’m not a fan of controlling games using a mouse and keyboard, but strategy/management games and MMORPGs are the exceptions. Here, though, it all controls quite well with the Xbox pad. The menus are simple groups of buttons that are easily negotiated with the left stick or d-pad, while the minigames that arise during certain tasks arguably handle better here than they would with PC controls.

These minigames are among the most notable features of Oil Magnate, serving to prevent the game becoming a boring stat-fest. Most commonly you will have to hold a twitching dot in the centre of a circle while drilling for oil, to represent keeping the drill on course. Should one of your wells catch fire, either by chance or thanks to sabotage, you have to run around the area using dynamite to kill the flames before too much damage is done. There’s also another minigame, but I don’t want to talk about it. No really, I’d rather not. Leave me in blissful denial for a while longer.

You’ll notice I mentioned sabotage. This is a nice feature that adds a bit of mischief to proceedings. Tired of buying, selling and drilling like a good little millionaire? Feeling pressured by your superhumanly astute business rivals? Go all Donald Trump on their asses and hire a terrorist to burn down their rigs and storage tanks, or deflate oil prices in their chosen market to cut down their profits. Oil is a dirty business, and don’t think for a moment that your rivals will be able to control their own barbaric fiscal impulses. On the other hand, you run a very serious risk of having your wells confiscated if you’re found out, so maybe you’d be better off sticking to the straight and narrow after all. The price of endorsing terrorism is being made slightly less rich. Who says indie games can’t be realistic?

Oh alright. Alright. I’ll tell you about the other minigame. I suppose I have no choice.

The third minigame is demonstrated in the game’s tutorial video, which makes it look simple. Unfortunately, as with everything else it shows you, the tutorial video is being slightly less honest than an East End market trader enticing you with his ‘nearly new’ plasma TVs.

I was all set to award Oil Magnate a 4 out of 5, maybe even leaning towards a 5 out of 5 depending on its longevity and replay value. The third minigame made me, in my darker moments, want to give it a 1 out of 5 and tell it to be grateful for my merciful nature. If I could punch a collection of digital information in the face, I would swing a haymaker at Oil Magnate with careless disregard for the state of my knuckles every single time I see the word ‘pipeline’.

I’m getting angry just thinking about it. This minigame is simple in principle, but ferociously difficult in practice. Sometimes when you try to sell your oil stocks, a message will appear telling you that your workers need help laying a pipeline. Presumably this is how they transport the oil to the buyer, though frankly, constructing mile after mile of entirely new pipe every time you make a sale doesn’t seem like efficient retail practice. When I order a new game online, I don’t find Amazon or Gamestation building a monorail to my doorstep.

For reasons we will never understand, this is how your oil is moved in the confused world of Oil Magnate, and like any good corporate fat cat you done your scruffiest trousers and wade in to help the plebs yourself when they’re shorthanded. You must connect the end of a pipe in the bottom right of the screen to another pipe-end in the top left. You extend the pipeline in any of four directions by pressing the corresponding face buttons, making sure you weave around hillocks and the corpses of other oil barons who did this once too often. Probably.

Promo pics for every minigame except the pipeline. It dare not show its face in my presence.

Simple, right? The problem is that you’re racing against an opponent who is trying to connect the other two corners for his own nefarious oil-retail purposes. Still doesn’t sound too bad; a bit of healthy competition to keep you on your toes. But your opponent is flawless; it will lay its pipe without hesitation in the perfect route, without the slightest error or pause to draw breath. You must avoid any sort of delay, since even half a second will cost you the ability to sell your oil this month.

Add to this the fact that some of the obstacles don’t seem to be obstacles at all, looking instead like just part of the ground. Further add to this the fun quirk of control that has pipes extending forward before turning; if you press X to extend left, it will go forward then left, resulting in running into obstacles that you thought you should be clear of.

I’ve played Oil Magnate for somewhere around six or seven hours so far, and out of the dozens of times the pipeline minigame has arisen, I’ve succeeded once.

You might think I’m over-emphasising one small problem, but this is very nearly a game-ruining flaw. You see, if you fail at the pipeline game and can’t sell oil that month, you haemorrhage money. Only this afternoon, one single pipeline game moved me from almost pole position to a miserable near-ruined mess in one month. I managed to slowly get out of the red (though still very much trailing behind the competition) over the course of the next few months, only to be hit by another two pipeline games in a row, utterly finishing off my oil business and costing me the game.

This has happened more than once. A lot more than once.

Compared to the pipeline fiasco, my other complaints – no save game facility and an unhelpful tutorial – are mere niggles. Oil Magnate had been a 4, maybe even a 5. Now it’s a 3, holding on by the skin of its teeth thanks solely to everything else about it being well executed.

As I said, Oil Magnate has a lot going for it. Mostly I quite enjoy it, and maybe you will too. It has enough management sim aspects to appease an anally retentive streak, but is simple enough to be reasonably accessible to management dunces such as me. The vampire of statistical tedium is warded off by the garlic of minigame diversions. Though the tutorial misses out most of the important stuff, and the inability to save your game if you realise your dinner is burning detracts from the experience, they’re just inconveniences.

The ill-conceived pipeline minigame, though, almost derails the whole thing. It can drop you from triumphant front runner to abject game-over in a matter of seconds, not because it demands skill but because it tricks you with poor visual design, confounds you with bizarre movement control, and demands computer-like perfection to defeat the eternally flawless CPU opponent. As someone who has been playing video games on a regular basis for 25 years, I have skills. But I can’t beat the pipeline problem, and sadly Oil Magnate itself can’t quite overcome it either.  A fun game, but every moment is a countdown to inevitable disaster.

Maybe it really is going for realism.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.