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amazon The Survivalists reviews
The concept of the game “open-world survival” is not too new anymore.
For example, we have many famous names in this genre such as Don, Starve, Conan Exiles, The Long Dark …
Although no longer booming like in the previous years, but games containing two keywords “survival” and “open-world” at the same time always have a huge fan waiting for 24/7.
And fortunately, The Survivalists is a game that does very well with the parts that contain the other two sacred words, or at least it does well enough to not be cursed at by the difficult “disciples”.
The Survivalists are pretty quick to get straight to the point, before you know what happens, you become a bald guy (but with no bar code on the back of his head) … struggling in the sand!
After some hurried character customization, you are given a chest containing the basics.
Add 15 minutes for some tutorial conversations and you can make a stone ax to clear the bushes and a few other miscellaneous things you picked up on the beach.
And that is all that you have in your journey to be king of the monkey island.
So we have a very basic starter story for a survival game, so what about the open world?
The island that you are preparing to become bosses is inspired by tropical islands located in South America, so what you imagine about a wild tropical island, The Survivalists will fulfill all of that for you.
There are many places in the game, but divided by nature, they include 4 types of areas: rainforest, sea, swamp, and volcano.
Each area has a different feature according to its name, for example, the forest will contain most of the items needed to build but also contain the most enemies such as aboriginal people, wild boars, tigers, newspaper…
A tip for you to start with is to choose the beach as a campsite, where there are few enemies, convenient for collecting quest maps and drifting monuments into the sea.
And if you’ve built a boat successfully, moving around, the island, as well as the food problem, is easily done.
In addition to the natural areas, scattered around the island will be dungeons, currently, there are 4 different types of dungeons based on the 4 gods of the island: monkeys, pigs, bats, and cats.
Each dungeon will have different types of traps and different rewards.
Most of the dungeons are strictly guarded by the natives on the island, so prepare your weapons well if you want to be Lara Croft or Nathan Drake.
With many enemies, of course, you also have to have many allies. So, who is our ally?
None other than the greedy and easygoing monkeys on the island.
The simplest and most basic way to pull a monkey on your side is… give them food and they will do whatever you want.
Cutting trees, carrying, breaking rocks, shoveling soil to building houses, scouting, clearing antiques, and fighting for their owners … Monkeys will be subjects and you will be the king of them, as long as you enough food.
Besides, you can also set up a sequence of actions for each of your monkeys, such as creating a freight line across the island, an automatic production and distribution chain …
There are many ways to use monkeys depending on your playing style.
As an “open-world survival” game, but The Survivalists have gradually turned the “survival” into something redundant in the middle of the game.
Why did the writer say that while complimenting the survival part above?
Because in The Survivalists, the feeling of “fear of death” is only limited to the stage: when you have nothing at hand!
Unlike other games, most players are alone, with The Survivalists, after building the “empire”, all your enemies will be buried by the mighty “army of monkeys” before they even try to attack you.
Besides, the lack of any punishment given in The Survivalists is also a reason why the game loses its training feature.
Also in The Survivalists, except that you let your character “starve”, your physique is almost always healthy.
Day and night is just a filter that changes the color of the screen for you to capture “selfie”, not the feature that forces you to run around looking for a torch if you do not want to get caught up in the night.
The part “building” that is inherently what needs investment is done very negligently.
Most of the things on the building board can be easily crafted with… a few items picked up around and over half of them are useless!
Do you need a purple bow when it’s the same as a blue bow? An ax is fine, but it can not do anything apart from cutting trees, while the monkeys just need a sharp stone to “clean” an entire land for you!
And if you’re too bored with running home to save the game? Just take 10 steps and build a bed!
Along with everything you create has a cheap price, you have to “sad more” because what you can do is nothing compared to an immortal monkey doing it for you.
There is almost no punishment for monkeys except for food, they cannot die, have no limits, do not betray you, and do everything you can.
Because of that, almost 2/3 of the remaining phase of The Survivalists becomes the game “catching and training monkeys”.
And when you think the monkeys are almighty, they will show you “they’re monkeys”.
You can only assign one monkey at a time, which is quite easy when you only have 1 or 2 but if you have 20 monkeys our story will be different.
For example, a monkey is assigned to cut trees and even if you are being chased by a pig around the map it will not care until you give it a club and require it to hit the pig!
When you force a monkey to stop working, all the rest of the monkeys stop working and if you tell them to give you something, they will “give back everything they keep” to you, including the items that do their job and you have to give that stuff back “to each monkey”.
The quests and the treasure are also redundant, you will almost automatically complete the task while walking around the island and the rewards are not too attractive to make you have to prioritize doing them.
Even the hidden rewards from the temple or the goods from the mystic merchant, as well as an added feature, mainly for you to achieve 100% beautiful game achievement.
Progressive discovery is not fun anymore as your goal gradually changes from learning to “ending this game quickly” when everything is too simple, too similar and everything is automated (and if you play multiplayer, it’s twice as fast).
Above all, with being advertised as “spin-off” (extra story) of The Escapists, The Survivalists is too inferior to what the “cosmic” brother can do.
And obviously, it’s not worth the $ 24.99 price tag for an “instant” product either, because at that price you can find a lot more depth.