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.

The top-down shooter genre is very saturated these days, but developers Headless Wizard aim to stand out with their unique art style and addictive, fast-paced gameplay. Enter Bloody Streets, a top-down shooter that is chock full of heavy metal and heavy violence toward the undead. 

 In Bloody Streets, you must survive waves of monsters. The objective is to survive until the end of each level and rack up as many points as you can in the progress. The more kills you get in succession the higher the point bonus. Using explosives and the environment are also key ways to boost your points.  More weapons are unlocked as you proceed through the game. Headless Wizard boast that there is “music dynamic rhythm system”, but I didn’t notice any changes based on my actions. The “music dynamic rhythm system” may be something that will be added at a later time.

For the demo I was given the tutorial and first five levels, and it was just enough to get me craving for more. The first level was simple, primarily an extension of the tutorial. The second level is where things started heating up. The difficulty shoots up very quickly as you are forced to think on your feet. Using the environment is essential for survival; the levels are littered with hazards and environmental switches that can work with or against you. As the game progresses I was introduced to new and more aggressive enemies. There are acid-spitting arachnids, exploding zombies and more. They came at me in startling numbers, forcing me to retreat while spraying bullets and lobbing grenades. At one point I lured a giant mob of my pursuers to a giant spinning saw blade and watched the points rack up.

The art-style of Bloody Streets is a cartoony hand-drawn style. This contrast the over the top violence taking place, making the animations satisfying yet humorous.  The animations on the game are  polished, complimenting the tight controls of the game. The characters are nothing special to look at, but masterpiece of blood you can create is spectacular.

The little bit of time I had with Bloody Streets was very enjoyable, I hope the entirety of the game holds up to my expectations. Bloody Streets can be voted for on Steam Greenlight for PC and Linux, and you can find the official website here.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Now I know how school teachers feel. Not because teachers routinely set up chaingun turrets to contain the influx of shambling students (though I’m pretty sure it crossed my metalwork teacher’s mind from time to time) but because it’s very frustrating to watch someone, or something, with real ability fall on its face because it’s too lazy to try.

Zombie Crossing (formally uncapitalised as zombie crossing – not a good start with a pedant like me) is a tower defence game that benefits from some nice ideas but also suffers badly from some awful design choices and an evident lack of any sort of playtesting.

There are far too many zombie-based games on Xbox Live’s indie channel, but this one actually makes good use of the theme. A zombie apocalypse is a logical basis for a tower defence game, involving as it does hordes of mindless enemies advancing stoically against a beleagued defensive line. The presentation is pretty good, particularly for an Xbox indie. It’s not uncommon for games on this service to look like they were drawn in Microsoft Paint, but this one, while not XBLA standard, has real game-like visuals with character models and convincing environments, plus a couple of nice touches like the blood trail that denotes the horde’s route in the first couple of levels.

Upon first playing Zombie Crossing, my impression of it wasn’t great. Its control scheme is an immediate problem. On top of the awkwardness of navigating the in-game menus using the triggers and D-pad, the left stick control is too responsive for the small size of the spots where you can place turrets, meaning that you often twitch back and forth for several seconds trying to get the cursor in the right place. This is inconvenient enough even pre-attack, but reaches a new infuriating low when you’re trying to add new defences in the middle of battle. The issue finally passes through rock bottom and splashes into the sewer when you try to upgrade a turret; the ‘upgrade’ button is so narrow that its almost impossible to hit. I have yet to successfully upgrade even one turret thanks to this miserable design oversight. Having someone playtest the game for more than five minutes would have revealed this problem, but I assume that never happened.

The turrets also don’t face the way you tell them to. You can rotate each one to aim in a particular direction, but more often than not they will ignore your instruction. It doesn’t sound like a serious problem, but turrets take so long to rotate and open fire that you can end up with legions of them never opening fire because they can’t rotate in time.

This lack of playtesting is evident throughout Zombie Crossing, and the problems I’ve detailed above turn out to be the least of them.

The idea behind Zombie Crossing is a pretty good one. You aren’t just defending against a certain number of waves; you’re trying to amass enough money to purchase a nuclear strike, which will bring a final end to that level and move you on to a new map where you start the process over. Advancing from level to level unlocks extra options in the research menu, enabling you to buy barricades, slowing effects and the like.

As I persisted with Zombie Crossing I began to forgive it for its flawed controls. The research side of things is barely explained, but I soon worked out how it works. The objective is also not explained – the game tells you that you should try to buy a nuke, but makes it sound like a friendly suggestion rather than the aim of the whole game. It took me probably 30-40 minutes to realize that nuclear bombardment is how you progress to the next level. I’d been starting to think the game had only one level! This is a problem, but not a crippling one. Besides, maybe I’m just dense.

The first and cheapest upgrade you can buy is the sniper rifle, which gives you a first-person view from a rooftop, from which vantage you can pop high velocity rounds into the shuffling undead. A nice touch, I thought. Sniping one zombie at a time seemed like it probably wouldn’t be much use in the grand scheme, but it would give me something to occupy myself with while the turrets were doing the serious clean-up.

In the event, that’s not quite how it worked out. This is where the problems begin in earnest.

The sniper rifle is traditionally a precise instrument that fires single bullets into carefully chosen targets. Zombie Crossing‘s sniper rifle is more like a rocket launcher. As long as your bullet hits a zombie, there will be an explosion that rips apart any others standing nearby. Plus it’s a one hit kill across its whole area of effect. The game soon ceases to be a tower defence at all, and instead becomes a case of just bombing crowds of zombies with your ‘sniper’ rifle as they bottleneck at their spawn point, and positioning a couple of towers close by to mop up the handful that get through. Even the larger, tougher boss zombie that appears at the end of each wave keels over much more quickly by thumping a few sniper shots into it than by shredding it with a dozen turrets. So the control problems become irrelevant, as do the upgrades, most of the research and the towers themselves. You start the game with a few hundred dollars; the sniper rifle costs you $100 to buy, and $1 to activate.

This problem becomes less pronounced as you gain extra turret types a few levels in, and the tower-based strategy becomes actually practical. But for the first few levels (which could be either a brief period or quite a long time, depending on how you choose to spend your resources) Zombie Crossing is barely even a game. It’s more ‘click on a few points in one area’. You know what else does that? Your desktop. Desktops aren’t known for being the height of entertainment.

That’s not all. The sniper rifle issue is idiocy of design, but perhaps not the most glaring example of zero playtesting. When you unlock the barbed wire barricade on level 2, you must never use it. It crashes the game. Not once, not twice, but 100% every single time I use it, without fail. You can, with some difficulty, play the rest of the game without using the barricade – it isn’t completely essential – but that isn’t the point. The point is the game is fundamentally broken, and clearly even the developers themselves never actually played it or they would have noticed this.

Again, a total and sickening lack of playtesting before release. Or if it was playtested, it by someone who was out of the room at the time. Maybe in another town entirely.

There are some other problems that could easily have been picked up on too, but they’re small potatoes compared to the game-crushingly huge ones. I’ll give one prominent example though.

If you pause while sniping, the crosshairs disappear and you get just a pointer instead. And you will do this a lot thanks to the need for coins. Zombies often drop gold coins that you can only pick up by pressing the Back button, yet that same button also brings up the pause menu. Every time you try to collect currency the game pauses, which would be bad enough by itself but also immediately draws attention to the vanishing crosshairs. How did anyone think this was a good idea, and why did no one who playtested it say “hey guys, this is really really annoying”? Oh wait, I can guess…

It’s moronic to a degree that left me breathless with horror and despair. In any other game, this oversight alone would be enough to turn a recommendation into a warning. Here, it’s not even the worst offender.

It’s a terrible shame. The game looks and sounds good, its atmosphere works, the research idea could have been fun, and it seems to be a decent length (though the levels start repeating after an hour or so). The sniper feature is a nice addition in principle, and even with some flaws the game could have been worth a recommendation. I really tried to enjoy it, and at the times when the menagerie of glitches, bugs and design ineptitude weren’t leaping out to punch my enjoyment in the face, it was pretty fun. I don’t want to emphatically tell you not to buy it. If you’re forewarned, you might have fun with it.

But at the same time, I can’t recommend it, particularly as the Xbox indie scene doesn’t lack good tower defence games. As a retail product, this is unsuitable to be on sale. It’s a first draft. I read, check and edit my reviews repeatedly before they reach the public eye, but Zombie Crossing doesn’t extend the same courtesy. I even tried to contact the developers to give them a chance to patch it before I stuck the boot in, but I couldn’t find any contact details or even a Facebook page. Always be reachable, developers.

Zombie Crossing could have done well for itself if it had been released in a finished and tested state, but as teachers often say, “must try harder”. Or as my metalwork teacher always said, “I am a violent man!” After a missed opportunity like this, he should be.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

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

Nostatic Software has announced the release of their action shooter Block Zombies in the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace. The developer says the following about the game:

In a world gone wrong, one girl stands alone. Alone, but not unarmed!

Strange crystalline structures have turned the populace into mindless, zombie-like creatures.

Explore a variety of environments and upgrade your arsenal as you take on the zombies and blow them into their constituent blocky bits.

Fight the Zombies! Stop the Infection! Save the Day!

This Voxel-based  single-player shooter only runs 80 Microsoft points. so go give it a try today.

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