Zombies, zombies everywhere and not enough to kill. Enter the world of the survivor; a shipwrecked individual who has to use their ingenuity to survive an island of the undead and try to escape. Are you smart enough to outwit the undead or will you become another one of their legion? Welcome to How to Survive.
Zombie games are becoming a dime a dozen, essentially becoming a genre in their own right. H2S tries to be different by focusing the game and story on one element that is missing from a lot of zombie games: the survival. Dead Island tried to incorporate that with weapon degradation, but H2S takes it a step further asking you to manage your fatigue, thirst and hunger. Yes, hunger, that magical condition for living that 99.9 percent of games forget is essential for staying alive. Your sprint meter is also limited and drains faster than it recovers, making much of the gameplay in H2S a battle of wits.
Following a shipwreck and with just a backpack in your possession, the player is tasked with using anything and everything he finds to craft the right weapons needed for survival. Pieces of chain, tubing and a jerry can, for example, can be turned into a powerful chainsaw. The same goes for armor and healing items. Sadly, there is not a lot of depth to the crafting system, like in Dead Rising, because it follows a standard RPG formula. Make a weapon, progress in the game, find better designs, deconstruct and make the newer, better weapon. Then lather, rinse and repeat for the small amount of items that are creatable.
There are three characters available for selection, each with a different attack animation, skills and abilities. Leveling up is a slow process, one that makes the grinding from the NES version of Final Fantasy feel like a five second sprint. It sounds harsh but it feels like it was tacked on rather than an integral part of the game. Skills also feel useless. Each time you level up you get a skill point to allocate in a chart system. The first point is useless though because you have to use it to learn how to light fires with your lighter, which can’t be skipped because otherwise the story can’t progress. Except for boosting abilities, the rest just negate the penalties of hardcore mode or allow you to make items.
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Playing through the game’s story also feels like a grind as everything can be termed under fetch quest. Some of the objectives feel like they’ve been added on to artificially extend the length of the story instead of allowing it to be a shorter but more concise experience. Combat too gets boring quickly due to the unbalanced enemy combat. Bombers, aka boomers, ruin the flow of combat, forcing egress every time one is seen in a group because of the poor aiming of weapons. It is a constant game of two steps forwards, three steps back.
Challenge mode spices things up, however, and keeps it fresh by epitomizing the core elements of the game. With a random island, only your back pack, and everything else randomized, good luck. Some of the challenges have themes like chainsaw massacre that gives you a chainsaw early, or another that has zombie animals like ostriches. However, the overall randomness of what you get each time you start makes it more fun. It is also a one shot experience where you have to make it to the plane as quick as possible or die. No redos, or saves in challenge mode.
The little amount of music in H2S fits the dark, survival theme but it only plays when you reach a zombie hotspot. The rest of the time only the sounds of birds, waves and zombies can be heard, which emphasizes that survivalist, hopeless scenario. Graphics are as minimal as the music as well. Simple 3D models are used, though they look effective. It would have been more creative, however, if there were more than around six enemy models to look at through the entire game.
Kovac is the shining bright spot in the game. The voice actor for the character was an excellent hire. Having the character poking fun at the whole situation through his Kovac’s Rules pages, which can be found throughout the island, make tutorials a lot of fun. If Napoleon couldn’t conquer Russia, he is doing his brethren proud by not being conquered by some silly zombie army.
Overall, it feels like How to Survive is a great concept hampered by the wrong genre. For what is presented it would have worked a lot better if it added sim elements due to the fact that combat is too slow, and the survival aspects not dire enough to have the flow needed for an edge of your seat twin-stick action game. Dead Nation is the poster child for that type of game and sadly H2S is missing any those core elements to replicate its success.