Survive the Fall by Angry Bulls Studio
I love a good survival game. I love CRPGs. I like tactical games. I like simulators and colony builders. Isometric action RPG? Check. I’ve tried a lot of them. I like them in board games. I like them in video games. I also like stray indie passion projects that go off the beaten path and try something new.
One of my favorites was Survivalist, originally released on the Xbox Indie marketplace, which had this incredible first-person selfie cam that showed the player in a top-down third-person universe, along with countless interesting NPCs and interactions, heaps of small optional side-quests, and fast zombies you had to take down with fiddly inventory management. Oh and manage your diabetes with insulin shots.
So when Survive the Fall came along, I thought this was a bull’s-eye.
Survive the Interface
As I started the tutorial, I could feel that the controls were a little roughshod, and some of the interactions were a bit janky, but I was more than willing to forgive it. The world design looked nice enough. The lore was a little overwrought regarding some stasis-radioactive threat consuming the land, but along we went. I got some vibes from Lost, the TV show The Last of Us, and rural wilderness tracking and hunting themes. A touch of Wasteland 3.
I thought it was particularly cool that the party of three men could be deployed independently and in real-time to fulfill small tasks before running back to rejoin the group. There were keyboard shortcuts for delegating them, shooting, pulling out different weapons, and tabbing between them.
But after the opening, curiosity started to settle; I began to get a sinking feeling that the granularity of controlling all these characters would get a bit like splitting tab among 12 friends. 29 minutes in, I was still learning new keyboard commands and figuring out where things were in the UI. Once I reached my first larger combat session, I couldn’t figure out how to gain independent control of each of my party members to deploy their tactics. Oh neat, they had stealth, and throwable weapons, and initiative, and…I couldn’t get anything done.
I mean, OK, I can pause and set up some action orders, and swap characters, but it felt like I didn’t have the control I wanted or needed, and I eventually realized that I didn’t have the mental stamina to track all of these novel parameters.
Some of them were familiar; some seemed proprietary. There is no drag-and-drop where there should be, menus don’t close the way you expect. On their own, they may be “like-to-haves” but it adds up. Ket;s just say flow state wasn’t on the menu.
Everything to Everyone in the Same Old Post-Apocalypse
There is a lot of game here that could be enjoyed. An ambitious one at that: there is stealth, hunting and tracking, party management, base-building, tactical combat, skill development, and more. It’s clearly a labor of love.
And there’s something fun about this top-down CRPG-style survival game, despite the unfortunately cliche and oddly generic post-apocalypse. There are cool building designs, a sort of cross between Appalachia, New York, and Louisiana, and is at times a world that you want to sink down into, but for all its complexity, it also feels somehow shallow.
The cultists are standard-issue – bald, shirtless bad guys – for example that look mostly the same. Why not take a chance and make something more interesting than the equally generic title? There was minimal background or world-building in the time I played. It’s in there somewhere, but unlike Wasteland, Fallout, Victor Vran just nondescript.
So I will go down the middle with this one and say there’s promise. I think it was released too early; it needed a little more time in the oven, a little more playtesting, and UX refinement. But as it meets its public, if they are compelled enough to care, the devs have clearly been active in making requested fixes and fine-tuning. Maybe a year from now, this could be a great and compelling survival game.
the Verdict
As it stands, I will park it at “worth considering with a little more development time,” particularly because I liked some of the interesting multi-agent mechanisms I encountered, and there is more to do than I felt comfortable with. I never felt that way playing Baldur’s Gate 3, so it has something to do with those little snags that wear you down.
This is a sincere effort to give you all the things you want. Unfortunately, it became too much of a mental toil to find the flow along the tainted river.
Survive the Fall is available via Steam Early Access.
Watch the trailer for Survive the Fall below:
