Unturned, A Journey

[Kaldrak]

I wake up on a beach.

The grass waves in the wind in front of me and strangely shaped clouds scurry across the sky. Where am I? What am I doing here? Why don't I have any clothes?

Questions, questions.

Unfortunately, I have no answers, so I set off in search of solutions. I swim off into the clear waters of the lake. In the distance I see what appears to be a boat at a dock. The S.S. Haven.

Huh, someone's moving around on deck. I wonder who they are?

Sadly, I cannot pull myself up onto the boat from the water, so I make my way to the shore and step onto dry land. A pair of not-so-friendly natives greet me: an angry construction worker and a man wearing a chef's hat.

After a fierce brawl, during which I sustain a few injuries, I manage to punch the two of them into submission and make my way onto the docks. I wondered why their skin was green and why they had bitten me, but I have little time to ponder the mystery, as several more green skinned natives come lurching and snarling out of the nearby buildings.

I run into a cargo container on the docks, hoping to hide and wonder of wonders, I find an axe lying on the ground. Suitably armed, I desperately charge into the teeth of the ravening undead horde.

Thus ended my first life in Unturned.

Life number two began in a small town.

I was in a house, still sans clothes and with no weaponry at my disposal. This time around I decided to avoid the docks and I searched the area for supplies. I found a handgun and a plain white shirt. Across the street I located a Laundromat and some pants.

Clothes at last!

More undead attack me in the Laundromat. I fend them off with handgun, but the noise draws a crowd of them to the street that I am unable to deal with, with my limited supply of ammo.

So ends life number two.

Huh, this game is somewhat hard.

Life number three started at a fairly peaceful campground. There were a few tents and a couple of small cabins, inside of which I found some nice supplies. Another axe, some type of backpack which increased my carrying capacity, and a cot which I immediately placed down inside the larger of the two cabins and tried to sleep in.

Strangely enough, though there are multiple beds located around the game world with pillows and blankets and the like, you can't use those to set your respawn point, oh no, that would be too easy. Instead you have to use tiny, uncomfortable looking cots or sleeping bags.

Ok I'll just...sleep on the floor then. Perfectly good looking bed right there in the same room, but I'm fine here, thanks.

You can't really sleep anyway. It just sets a point where you respawn after you die, instead of being randomly spawned all over the game map each time. Sadly, life number three ended badly for me as well. I had no food and no water and though the campground is a nice enough place with a low rate of zombies spawning in on you, it doesn't have much in the way of supplies that you can eat and drink.

It is very easy to die in Unturned.

The game starts you off with very little in the way of explanations for anything. There is a tutorial, but it's hardly comprehensive, covering only some basic moving and shooting mechanics, plus the whole 'getting into a vehicle and driving around' thing.

After you've done that, you might as well throw yourself into the main game. A game which says, "Well, here you are. You've got no food, no water, no supplies, and no clothes. Have fun dying repeatedly until you can figure things out."

And figure things out I did.

Eventually.

I must say that the game looks very pretty, though the clouds are a rectangular shape that reminded me immediately of Minecraft. Nothing much else is like that though, except the zombies and an annoyingly complex crafting system.

Oh and you only start with four slots for carrying things until you find a backpack of some kind. It's not much, so that should be one of your first priorities.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself though, aren't I?

First I should start with how much the game costs. Well, for you penny-pinchers out there, (myself included) I've got good news! It costs absolutely nothing. Nadda. Zip. Zilch. No money for entrance. Play as much as you like for free. That's why it's under the 'free to play' category on steam.

Free to play, you say? But that means it must be pay to win, right? Not necessarily. In the first place you would be making the assumption that this is some sort of multiplayer game and as it is still in 'early access' (which means they've released a build of their game while they are still developing it) it has no official servers or ability to directly connect one person to another. I believe you can play over a LAN connection though, and if you're an enterprising sort like myself, you can get a program called Hamachi and set up a VPN and connect to another computer remotely.

Basically, if you want true multiplayer support you have to set it up yourself with a third party program. Not the best start to things, but hey it's still free and they're still working on it.

So the first thing you can do in the game is set up a character. Your options are sadly limited and the character models look like something out of Gumbi, so it doesn't matter that everyone's naked as they look kind of like they're made of taffy. There are a few more customization options and you can have your name in gold letters if you pay five bucks for a 'gold' account, but there's really no reason to do that unless you want to support the developers.

This game is a 'zombie survival simulator' a genre which apparently has a rapidly growing number of games within it. Your principal stats are your health, hunger, thirst, and sickness. If any of the latter three reach one hundred percent, than your health will steadily drop until you are dead or you find something to reduce the stat.

Hunger and thirst will steadily climb as you play and function sort of like countdown timers ticking down until your demise. You need food and water, but they're both hard to find. To decrease the rate at which these stats increase and effectively give yourself more time to find food and water before death, you can put points into the 'survival' skill. I would highly recommend dumping all of your points into this skill as the first thing you level up, simply because it increases your odds of surviving by a considerable amount.

The third stat is the disease stat. Being bitten by zombies and eating and drinking moldy food and drinks will increase this stat. It can be decreased by the use of antibiotics and vaccines and other medical supplies found at pharmacies and medical tents. Odds are, your primary source of sustenance early on will be moldy supplies. I was continually eating moldy veggies and drinking moldy orange juice and even moldy bottled water (dunno how that happens).

Yes, that does sound pretty disgusting. Why do you ask?

There are of course non moldy supplies, but they are rare. I found some candy bars and some cans of cola and a couple of different types of canned food. Luckily, you need no can openers to partake of their canned deliciousness, so eat away. Other sources of food include deer or Elk or something, which will increase your sickness meter by a lot if you eat their tasty meats raw, so watch out.

You need to build a campfire to cook things, but first you need sticks and rocks to make a campfire, but before that you need a pick to break big rocks into smaller ones, and unless you're lucky enough to find sticks lying around all over the place, you'll need some way to chop down a tree for sticks.

The first thing you'll need to do in order to ensure your survival in this game is to establish a base in a secure area. I wouldn't recommend any of the towns due to the high rate of zombie spawns within, but if you can stick your bed somewhere safe, then go right ahead I guess.

Once you've established a respawn point, you'll need a backpack to increase your carrying capacity. After that it's all about gathering supplies and utilizing your lives in a manner that will eventually ensure your survival without repeated respawns.

Gardening is one of the best ways to do this. Take one of the moldy vegetables and craft it into a seed. Plant seed into grassy area and wait for it to harvest. Take the fresh vegetable and unless you are starving, you should craft it into two seeds and replant until you have enough to feed yourself forever. You don't need to water the plants either, unlike some other zombie survival simulators I could mention (*coughProjectZomboidcough*). Unturned loses some points for realism and gains major points for ease of use and playability.

I approve.

But wait, what about water? Well, there are wells, but those are on the farms which have a lot of zombies in them, also you can't drink with your bare hands. The best way to ensure something to drink at all times is to live near a water source like one of the lakes. All you'll need to do then is acquire some water purification tablets and a bottle of moldy water. Combine the two in the crafting interface and you'll get a bottle of water that's clean. Then combine that with an empty can and you've got a refillable canteen full of fresh drinkable water.

The canteen can be used an endless number of times on any water source and I'd recommend carrying around at least one or two at all times.

So how does one get all of these nice things? Well, one goes scavenging for supplies, that's how. An unfortunate amount of time will be spent raiding and re-raiding the same towns over and over again for respawning items. The item and enemy spawns are random so it's a little different each time, but the buildings never change, so it can get a bit repetitive.

In order to conduct successful raids on towns chock full of the undead menace, you'll need decent weaponry. There are actually quite a few different types of guns in this game and you can customize them with sights and stocks and silencers and whatnot for added fun. Finding ammo is a bit of problem, but if you pick up the clips after you reload your weapon, you can combine them with boxes of the right ammo type and refill them.

As always, shooting zombies is fun, but the louder the gun and the closer you are to a major town, the better the odds are of a zombie horde spawning almost right on top of you, trying to chew your face off. Things can get very hairy very quickly, even for a hardened, well equipped survivor, so it's good to have some avenue of escape nearby, like a getaway vehicle.

Driving is simple and uncomplicated, but you need to pay attention to two things. The first is your fuel level. There's gas storage in most of the towns where you can fuel up your car and it's a bit of a pain to haul around gas cans full of gas, but it all works well enough. The second thing is your car's durability. You see, zombies can destroy your car, attempting to get to you while inside of it. In fact, they can take ninja bites out of it even while running them over at high speed. If there's heavy smoke coming from the engine, then you should definitely be careful.

Yes, I did just say that zombies attempt to eat your car. Somehow, their bites are strong enough to break glass and steel.

Actually, zombies can chomp on anything that you or any other player place down in the game world. Why they would do this is puzzling.

How then do you manage to store all of the neat things you've acquired on your scavenging runs? Well, first you cut down a lot of trees and get a bunch of wood. Hopefully you have a handsaw as well. Then you build crates using the annoying six step crafting recipe. Before you do that you need to put at least one point in your crafting skill.

If you can get enough experience to buy a second point in crafting you can make locked chests which hold more items than the crates.

Crates only hold four things, but you can stack an unlimited number of stackable items inside of said crates. This is great, until a zombie spawns in and decides to munch on the crate until it's destroyed.

I became quite irate when this happened to me. I could understand zombies destroying say, a wooden barricade that I place between myself and them. I could understand them attacking the car in an attempt to eat me. I do not understand why every time zombies spawn in my campground I find zombies chewing on my metal lights and my generator, or why they munch on the crates themselves. Apparently they even eat your bed or your cot if they come across it.

Look, I know they're zombies, but someone needs to point out that these things are not zombie food and should not be chewed on.

See this? Fleshy human with tasty brain meats for chewing.

Now, these items here are made of metal and wood and are indigestible, even for zombies.
Why are you chewing on those things and ignoring the human?

Bad zombies! BAD. That's it, I'm getting the shotgun.

Look, I get that the game devs did this just to increase the difficulty, but it kind of backfired. My place is full of zombie decoy food. I can stroll out into the middle of the campground and casually wipe them all out while they are chewing on the metal work lights I have set up. I can surround my crates with sandbags and I've stored most of my nice things inside of the large cabin where I've barricaded the windows and added a door.

I would be happier with this mechanic if they gave the zombies a different attack. Maybe if they chewed on the humans and punched the non-organic things? Angry zombies out to wreck my stuff I can get behind. Hungry zombies eating metal work lights and sandbags and wooden crates full of ammo, not so much.

Oh and some way to accelerate the day/night cycle would be nice too. Nights last a long time and it would be nice to actually use my bed to sleep instead of just wandering around in the dark waiting for it to get light enough to see, or doing midnight gardening with my nightvision goggles.

I don't really have much more to add, other than that the leveling system takes a ton of experience to fully level up everything. You get XP by killing zombies and chopping down trees as far as I can tell. It can be easy to miss that there even is a leveling system as there's just this little button labeled 'skills' under the inventory menu.

You can also craft the parts for and build your own house...but why would I want to live inside of a building that can be eaten? The zombies don't eat the pre-generated buildings and you can always barricade the windows and doors, without going through the trouble of chopping down a hundred trees and collecting incredible amounts of wood you need to craft into sixteen plus different wood parts to build a house with. Also you need a lot of nails for some things.

I've reached the point where I'm surviving easily enough now. I've got body armor and a bunch of different guns and a large garden. I connected my game session to my little brother's using Hamachi and we go on scavenging raids in far-flung places on the map (you'll need to find one, otherwise you can get lost easily).

You'll never run out of zombies to shoot or kill with melee weapons. A little more variety in the zombie models would be nice though, as I think I've killed something upwards of a hundred chef zombies. There's always new loot to gather, but eventually you'll collect it all I suppose.

The main map that comes with the game is large and has several places to explore, but another map and some way to switch between characters on different maps so you could have more than one game going would definitely help lengthen the experience. As it is, things can get old after a while.

Survival simulators are interesting up to and until you reach the point where survival becomes boring and unchallenging. I haven't quite reached that yet, but I do feel as if I've reached a point where the game isn't terribly challenging anymore. There's nothing you can really do about this when you have a survival simulator. Eventually, players will find a way to survive, unless of course you make things so unfair, challenging, and complex that it becomes a miserable chore just to get anywhere or do anything.

Other then the zombie shooting and exploration parts, the major draw of the game is the complexity of the simulation aspects. There are a lot of things to craft and no way to know how to do any of it from the game itself. You'll just have to look up a guide unless you want to laboriously go through each and every item in the game and write down all of the possible combinations and outcomes. Luckily, someone else did that first.

That's why we have crafting guides.

I really did enjoy my time with Unturned. Sure, some things could be better, but there's a lot of fun to be had here, especially once they get the multiplayer elements streamlined and running correctly. Hostile players could add a whole new dimension to the game and it's quite fun going on scavenging raids with a bit of support from a friend with a sniper rifle in a tower.

Oh, and there's a crossbow if you want to pretend you're Darryl from The Walking Dead.

Anywho, the game gets a 7 out of 10 from me. It loses a few points due to a few key issues here and there, but it's definitely fun to play and the price is right.

Happy hunting, survivors. Don't let the zombies eat you out of house and home.

[Anastasia]

Sounds pretty amusing. I admit I see zombies and I think 'oh joy, another zombie game, skip', but I've never been a fan of the genre.

By the way, are you collecting these reviews anywhere else? They're pretty good, even if they hit games I usually don't play.

[Kaldrak]

I'm not sure what to do with my reviews, to be honest. I like writing them and they are a pretty good way for me to write without working on my novel and not be terribly serious about things, so I'll keep doing them, probably.

I've been toying with the idea of getting a blog or a website and posting them there, but I don't know. I'm glad you guys find them entertaining to read, at least. I've tried to do a few others. Maybe I'll post them here too. I'll have to think about it.

[Dracos]

Well, here works to collect them too? :D

Being a Zombie game I'm mostly the same.  I'll play them for co-op, not for zombies really.

Creating enemy variety in an inexpensive way is actually pretty challenging, so you don't see a lot of companies pulling it off without already having vast resources.