Releasing a definitive edition of a game a year after release can be a great thing. Not only is this tactic is a great way to pick up a final wave of sales a year later, but during a new console generation shift, this allows gamers like myself to finally play the game on my new console while it doesn’t have a huge library of games. Enter How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition and its recent release on Pc, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
Zombie games and, more notably, post-apocalyptic games, are a dime-a-dozen. I don’t feel like I’ve yet been inundated with the theme enough, though, and tend to gravitate towards them. How to Survive is a hardcore survival action-sim where you pick a character and get dropped on an island with the intention of getting off said-island. Of course, there are plenty of bad things to try and stop you, and while zombies and other nasty creatures are a big threat, the main enemy is yourself. You see, I had to stay hydrated, keep myself fed, and get plenty of rest, all while trying to get off that cursed chain of islands.
How to Survive has a few modes of play, but the main one is the campaign/story. Storm Warning Edition adds a plethora of new tidbits, like new characters to play as, a new island, and some other knick-knacks. Each character has a unique set of attributes, a slightly-varied skill tree with a single exclusive ability, and, from what I could tell, a personal set of animations when killing dead things. The campaign is a slow venture if you want to survive. Rushing around, I found myself getting stuck in sticky situations. Once I could craft a gun, which was pretty early on, the game got a hair easier for a while. I could pick enemies off as soon as I saw them at the edge of the screen. But when I started to get thirsty, a sense of urgency made me get reckless and run around more. That usually didn’t end well.
Crafting is the focal point, and most rudimentary mechanic in the game. The bad thing is, as a realistic point is made by limiting my carrying capacity, I found myself constantly weighing which item I should drop to pick up something I needed. With a huge list of items to combine, it was frustrating that there was no central hub or storage locker, at least that I had found. This makes for a challenge, sure, but as a lengthy campaign, choices I made very early on would come back to haunt me. Frustrating does not begin to explain my experience.
There was a silver lining in the story, and that was Kovak. Kovak was my best friend on the island. He left little letters and had a great sense of humor. I chuckled at almost every instance that he popped up, and it was on a regular basis.
There are several new modes. One is called One-Shot Escape, and is more rogue-line in nature than the sandbox campaign. You get one life to get off the island. Even on Easy, it’s far trickier than it sounds. Barricade is horde mode essentially, except if you can’t find someone to play with, the level of fun drastically decreases.
There is online matchmaking, but the few times I tried getting a game going online during peak times on Xbox One, I would sit there for minutes waiting and no one would show up. There is an option to play with friends, so if you and a buddy crave a challenge, this is probably for you. I, on the other hand, while I enjoy some tension in my games, don’t have the patience I had a decade or two ago and just don’t enjoy replaying difficult games. How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition has a lot of content, doesn’t look particularly astounding, and has a lot of replayability if you get your kicks on playing the same hard section over and over. I, for one, do not.
How to Survive was reviewed on Xbox One using code provided by the developer.
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