A bad day is a bad day and there is very little you can do to fix it. Maybe you decide to go to a renowned restaurant to eat fish with your family and the next day you find yourself vomiting your heart out because the fish wasn't exactly fresh, or you take a spaceship and end up on an alien planet, unfortunately crashing. in that . There is life in the universe and apparently it wants to eat us. These are things that happen, but they can have more than positive implications, as we will see in the Stranded: Alien Dawn Review, a survival game that turned out to be more interesting than expected.
Emerging narrative
Yes, it's true, we ended up in a strange world and had to face a thousand difficulties to succeed. survive to. We studied the local fauna and flora, learned about the available resources and how to obtain new ones. We hunted strange animals and grew strange plants, we ate everything without asking too many questions and all the while we continued collecting wood and other materials from whatever source we had at hand. At first we took refuge in shelters built from the remains of the spaceship in which we had crashed on this lush but hostile planet. Then we built our first house, which gradually became a villa overlooking Lake Duria, so called because we heard the echo of primordial creatures in our heads.
It's true, we were attacked by dozens of foreign (what if, in this case, we were the aliens?), some of those simple little dangerous insects, others twice as big as us that couldn't wait to taste Earth's meat.
We have never been caught off guard. At first we fought wielding spears built from improvised materials, like primitive ones, then we erected wooden fences attracting enemies to our defenses with careful study of the base, then we developed impenetrable defensive systems, including automatic turrets, flamethrowers, traps, motion sensors. and so on, until you drive fully armed real robots. In the meantime we have equipped ourselves with all the comforts. If you really have to die on an unknown planet, it is better to do so with air conditioning, powered by solar or wind energy, than to surrender to despair. Of course, life was not easy and soon the group's flaws began to surface, creating quite a few problems. In any case, the excellent work done saved us from moments of depression, pacifism, the ailments of age and many other psychological and physical problems that arose as the days went by. If after all this we are still here, there must be a reason.
In Stranded: Alien Dawn you survive, but you also thrive
If you haven't discovered it, Stranded: Alien Dawn is a survival management single-player game that focuses heavily on the emergent narrative created by its game systems. In a broad sense, it looks a lot towards Dwarf Fortress, even without touching its complexity, but also towards real-time strategy and life simulation like The Sims, although each system is contextualized to the setting. At the beginning of each game you must choose the planet to play on, the type of outpost you want to build, the available resources and the identity of the survivors who will make up our group of four or more people, accepting the automatic random selection. facts from the game, or directly choosing who to bring by first examining their characteristics to better reflect on whether they will be useful to us or not.
The landscape They deserve a separate word because they are very different from each other. In one you will have to build a real military post, in another a commercial one with the aim of accumulating enough money to buy the entire planet.
It must be said that we all preferred the standard scenario, the one whose main objective is to stay alive, because in many aspects it was more interesting and open than the others, which aim more at the specialization of the group. But back to our unfortunate heroes. Everything's fine survived He is more versed in certain activities than others. For example, you can choose someone who is a kind of master in combat, or a scientist who can observe the environment more quickly, or even a skilled craftsman. With time and use skills improve, but at first it is better to leave it alone. Naturally, there is no shortage of failures and during the game problems may arise related, for example, to the ease with which one of the survivors becomes depressed, or to the lack of suitable recreational activities. Each character trait of a character can create different and interesting game situations in its own way. It's a shame that the ability to create custom survivors is completely missing. In any case, with our team formed, it was time to crash their spaceship and then start looking around.
decorate the grave
Stranded: Alien Dawn is a game that grows in a continuous crescendo in the collection of means, which goes hand in hand with the increase in the aggressiveness of the local fauna. At first we need to collect material from the shell of our spaceship, in the meantime we need to look around to see where the most interesting resources are, to be taken immediately or at a later time, when the right technologies to use are found. They're available. There are so many things to do and the game leaves us with a lot of freedom to proceed as we want, freedom that increases as the hours go by, that is, when we have passed the phase of finding the means of subsistence and we have the appropriate resources.
When you realize that you can use everything, it is also the moment in which the gameplay opens up to the choices of the player, who must begin to design his base taking into account the productive, recreational and defensive aspects. In this sense, the possibilities offered by the title of Haemimont Games There are so many that it doesn't even make much sense to list them all.
The problem is just getting familiar with theinterface, sometimes not exactly immediate, since it is overloaded with dozens of functions for each activity, and micromanagement is decidedly profound and satisfying in the long term. So you not only have to choose what to build, but also assign priorities to individuals based on their skills, establish relaxation shifts so they don't go crazy, manage their requests so they don't do the jobs they hate the most. etc. . With technological development, it is also necessary to manage other aspects, such as the steps of the power line, or the route of the captured resources. On paper you can do everything with a couple of clicks, but there is no doubt that you can get a little confused at first. Fortunately, there is a rich tutorial that explains the basic concepts of the game, so as not to get lost at the first difficulty.
Until the good
The habitable situations in Stranded: Alien Dawn are really many, as are the dangers to face, which are not limited to the aforementioned aliens, but also to sudden and destructive hurricanes, diseases to be cured, conflicts between the characters themselves and scarcity. omnipresent. of materials. To counteract there are more relaxed moments, such as weddings or darts competitions or the pleasant behaviors that may arise within the group. In certain cases, especially in combat, it is possible to take direct control of the characters, bringing the experience closer to that of a real-time strategy game, although with many more limitations. In any case, in the end you have so many turrets and defensive means that it almost seems like you are playing a game. defense tower. It all works very well, as does the fact that the scenarios have an ending. Of course, you can build whatever you want, but at a certain point you will have to develop final technologies that allow you to finish the game successfully, such as useful interstellar communicators to call for help. It is not recommended to procrastinate for too long, as the hostile activities of the aliens become increasingly intense and dangerous, ending up killing many of the survivors... unless you have selected the pacifist mode in which all the aliens are killed. They become harmless and you can build in peace.
The problems with Stranded: Alien Dawn
Everything perfect then? Really Stranded: Alien Dawn some the problem Has it? Meanwhile, it is not very conducive to exploration, in the sense that the ability to independently produce resources after having studied them and prepared the necessary structures means that wandering is not necessary and you can concentrate on the area you have occupied. Given the substantial procedurally generated maps the game offers, we would have liked to see some incentive for exploration. Even from a technical point of view we expected something slightly better. In this sense, Stranded: Alien Dawn does its job, but visually it seems too anonymous and standardized to have anything to say. It works and doesn't require a NASA PC to run, but that's about it. The same goes for the music, composed of simple ambient pieces that quickly reach us. It's a shame, because if more attention had been paid to these aspects of the game, it would have been a true masterpiece. As it stands, it's simply a great game. That's no small feat these days.
Conclusions
Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam, playstation store, Xbox Store Price 34,99 € Holygamerz.com 8.5 Readers (11) 8.3 your voteStranded: Alien Dawn is an excellent survival game, as well as a title from the best Haemimont Games, which has shown great competence and skill in handling such a complex title. Of course, something more could have been done in the customization of the characters and in the graphic style, but apart from that it is an engaging experience that does not make you regret the time invested in the game.
PRO
- The survival part is excellent.
- Many things to do
- Deep management and micromanagement.
- It gives great freedom to the player.
AGAINST
- Bad character customization.
- Stylistically anonymous
