Team 17, authors of countless successful indie games, is back on top PC, PS4, Xbox One e Nintendo Switch with The Survivalists, a mix between a survival game and a management game. The particularity? We will have control of an increasingly large army of monkeys, ready to take care of all those minor jobs that would only waste us time. Will he have convinced us? Find out in our review.
The Survivalists | Review
Let's start with the basics. Once our game is generated, our castaway (or our castaway) awakens on a destroyed raft, on a quiet beach of a tropical island. After getting familiar with the commands, thanks to a quick textual tutorial, we get a handful of materials useful for building the first tools, such as a sharp stone useful for cutting down trees and bushes.
Our only real concern in the short term is having to eat. The Survivalists, as the name itself states, is a survival game, but it never really gets a grip on that aspect. Through a campfire we can cook using berries, coconuts, meat and other elements obtained from the animals of the islands, but even the simplest recipe is enough to keep us fit. If we take damage, we will see our health drop, but as we will soon explain, this is also not much of a problem.
Excluding particular biomes of the advanced stages, in fact, survival will never be a real concern. What's the point of the game, then? The escape of course. Our goal is to build a raft that will take us to the nearby islands and, finally, find a larger boat to survive the open sea outside the archipelago.
How to do? Our castaway clearly has an engineering background as he is able to create more or less anything with the most common resources. At any time and simply with our hands we can generate a handful of basic materials, such as worked branches, ropes, bowls of leaves and stone blocks.
Through these, we can build the "structures", that is walls, traps, chests, the aforementioned raft, workbenches, furnaces and much more. The latter, in particular, are used in turn to create other advanced objects, such as nails, wooden planks, glass and metal plates and so on, all fundamental for the more advanced "structures".
The play structure is therefore good or bad the one known to fans of the genre: find basic resources, create workbenches, produce more advanced resources, create better tools, optimize work and create new items. Obviously, we do not have access to every project from the very first moment: when we open the various creation menus we will only be able to see a few basic recipes. Creating such items, however, will unlock those immediately nearby. This system invites the player to experiment to see what's new available, also thanks to the fact that resources are abundant and that, regularly, the world is regenerated (trees, rocks, enemies reappear ...).
There is only one problem in all of this: each creation of a structure, production of an advanced object, tree felling and object collection takes time, a lot of time. Team 17 made the protagonist of The Survivalists slow and with a very limited stamina bar: he manages to shoot for a long time, but a few blows of the ax wear him out. Simply put, micromanagement is not recommended unless you want to spend hours pursuing more secondary tasks.
How to solve? With an army of monkeys, what questions are these?
The monkey sees, the monkey does
The real focus of The Survivalists, in fact, are the monkeys: the furry animals that inhabit the game's islands I am able to imitate almost everything we do, becoming even better than us. Some monkeys can be found on the map and can be added to your "forest gang" simply by giving them the object they requested, while others are imprisoned in dungeons and must first be saved.
In fact, there are dungeons in the indie game of Team 17 which, in addition to the monkeys, include treasure chests, of various rarity, which include advanced work tools, weapons and gold, useful for shopping in a shop / balloon that moves around the island on the island. Obviously all this defended by enemies (orcs, bats, resurrected skeletons…).
The combat system is very simple: you can do a wide roll, attack with a sword, spear or bow and, in case of precise dodging, activate a counterattack. Enemies will also attack our camp from time to time, but it only takes a couple of walls and a few ground traps to be right.
The bird's eye view and the control system don't get along perfectly: the fight is not satisfying, controller in hand. But that's not a problem, because the monkeys will fight for us.
As mentioned, monkeys can do everything we do and our job, once a dozen firsts have been obtained, it will be to supervise, rather than to do. Let's take an example of an efficient chain of work: one monkey fells trees using its tool, the second carries the wood and leaves that settle on the ground after the tree has been felled to a chest, a third moves the materials from chests to workbenches and the fourth creates objects. There are though two structural "limits" in this process.
The monkey doesn't do everything
First. Transport monkeys have a wide but not infinite radius, so if the materials on the ground are too far away they will not be seen: this is solved with an extra monkey moving the object from point A to point B, to make sure that both in sight of the aforementioned monkey number two.
According to. The tools have a durability: once worn, the object breaks forever. This means that a monkey without an instrument has no way to continue his task. Similarly, to the workbenches we will have to indicate a precise number of objects to create, otherwise the dedicated monkey will go on indefinitely or, better said, until the raw materials are exhausted. The thing is solved by going back and forth to the island (or the islands, as soon as you have production chains scattered throughout the archipelago) to give the monkeys the tools they need and to activate the workbenches, to produce the resources. you need.
As said, therefore, we oversee and organize, but do less and less as we go along, if not explore new islands and expand our (or) ranks. Controller in hand we will mostly have to assign tasks to the monkeys (it is better to specialize them in a specific task, because they level up and become more efficient). How you do it? It is not enough to choose a monkey and choose an action from a list; no, we must tell a monkey (or more than one) to observe us and, within a certain time limit, complete an action. The monkey will then understand the task and, given the right tool, he will start working, within his visual range.
This "monkey sees, monkey does" process makes sense in narrative terms, but in practice it soon becomes boring. It would have been much more convenient to have been able to just select the monkey and point her to the task from a list. Especially since it is necessary to go personally to each monkey to reassign a task or give it, as mentioned, a tool.
The playful fulcrum and uniqueness of The Survivalists, that is, the delegation of micromanagement to minions, is unfortunately its least in-depth point. The Survivalist is a survival and management game, but it doesn't press the accelerator in either case. Team 17 clearly wanted to create a mix, a midpoint between the two genres without giving real value to either of them.
Doubt is the kind of audience that can truly be satisfied with this compound. The most hardcore fans of survival games will not find bread for their teeth, while those who love precise and in-depth management systems will be disappointed by the paucity of options. The Survivalists is a game suitable for an audience intrigued by both genres, but who do not appreciate the more complex aspects of either of them.
The neighbor's monkey is always greener
The Survivalists also includes online play. We will be able to host or join a game with up to three other players. Each player can bring up to five monkeys with them and everything they can fit into a special chest, to be purchased in the traveling shop.
We also spend a few words on the technical, graphic and sound side of the game. The Survivalists is colorful and genre-appropriate, but it doesn't reach any stylistic peak. On screen there is a risk of chaos from time to time, especially since the maps are very dense and trees and bushes often block the road, blocking the view. On the plus side, the islands aren't too big (read: we don't have to spend minutes and minutes walking around doing nothing) and resources are always within reach. Finally, the music and effects accompany the gaming sessions without creating annoyance, but will not remain impressed.
