It’s rare that I feel a looming sense of apathy when I go to open a game. The feeling that maybe my time would be better spent elsewhere, like cleaning the house or walking a dog. Or just ... playing another game. Alas, every time I turned on Survive The Fall after my initial session I had that sort of feeling.
Survive The Fall is a top-down open world exploration game with a base-building element, set in a post-apocalyptic world. First you explore outside your base, collecting items and combating the various enemies and elements of the world. Once you have finished out in the open world, or more likely, have filled the space in your bag, you can go back to your camp and start the base-building part of the game. You use the items you’ve gathered to build structures and keep the survivors of your camp fed, healthy, and decontaminated.
In the open world, you play as a small squad of three survivors. You can swap between them at will, and give orders to the others to gather things while you move ahead. Often, you’ll need specific tools to clear paths or gather materials, so you are encouraged to have a diverse set of tools for any situation. Annoyingly, sometimes it is really hard to pick up items, especially if they overlap.
Combat is an essential part of the open world section, but it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Melee combat is really lacking. It feels floaty and you zoom all over the place. There’s no strategy apart from circling around the enemy and smacking them with a stick until they fall down. There is dodging, but it seems like it doesn’t do much against other melee combatants, who seem to hit you near instantly.
In stark contrast to melee, ranged combat is pretty well made. You can hold your aim on opponents to lock on to weak points or shoot environmental objects like explosive barrels, and there’s even a fast reload mini-game. Stealth combat is probably the most fun in my opinion, with a simple system based on sight and sound, but that also allows you to target enemies in a paused state and mark them for one of your squad to take out, similar to X-Com type games.
Heading back to your base throws you into the base-building section of the game. You only have a certain amount of time per day to build, clear debris, research, and satisfy your survivors’ needs before the day ends and you go out again. You can select any survivor to do any task, though certain survivors have a speed boost to certain tasks, so prioritisation is key.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t as engaging as I thought it would be. You can get basically all your requirements from purely looting, and the amount of effort didn’t seem worth it by the end. It also felt a little tacked-on as a "something to do" mechanic. The durability of buildings was also a massive issue, with structures requiring a repair not even a day after they were built, making things even more laborious.
What this game succeeds in most is a very palpable atmosphere. It really captures the feeling of a cruel world in which you are just trying to survive as society crumbles and grows more extreme around you. This is also helped by a wide variety of nice-looking locations to explore, chock full of environmental details for your eyes to feast on.
The nail in the coffin for this game though, is just how buggy and unpolished it is. Annoyances range from basic stuff like text being misspelled and differences between items on different screens to crashes multiple times an hour. Followers get stuck everywhere and, more irritatingly, block your character’s way and are seemingly unaware of that fact. Base mechanics like sharing a big meal don’t seem to heal what they say they should. Enemy view cones turn off while stealthing for seemingly no reason. AI baddies sometimes just don’t attack. I have also read about complete soft locks where you cannot progress the story.
Eventually, my character froze and nothing could move him. Unfortunately, this was during a scripted section where you are attacked, leaving one of my squad completely unable to defend himself as an enemy casually walked up and exploded next to him. The worst part was that he wasn’t even able to be moved after being revived. That’s when I decided to put down the game; this final straw had broken the camel’s back.
Survive The Fall could use a lot more time to remove the bugs and polish design decisions to make it a more coherent and enjoyable experience. There are some fun aspects to the game, but it’s constantly marred by issues that pull you right out of it. We already have some patches to fix the more major bugs but, for me, I was already put off trying it again.
Seems like this is perhaps one to check back in on in a year or so, once the game has a more sturdy footing.
By Michael Robertson
