“Where Survive’s action thrives is in its wave-based defense missions, which are also the format of its four-player co-op salvage missions in multiplayer with some minor differences. With an initially limited toolset of weapons and abilities, a lack of diverse situations to adapt to, and few compelling reasons to bother, Survive seems to fundamentally misunderstand the circumstances that have made fun, stealthy escapades possible in previous Metal Gear games. The one reason you benefit from a stealthier approach is because an enemy taken down with a sneaky backstab will contain more Kubon energy to harvest, but the currency is hardly in short supply. They also don’t chase you for very long, so attracting their attention has few consequences. Overall, Survive’s enemies are mindless and predictable - they don’t interact with each other in any dynamic way and they don’t exhibit any challenging behaviors to overcome. The standard crystal-headed zombies dominate the vast majority of the combat, and it isn’t until more than halfway through the campaign that their slightly more interesting variants start to show up in greater frequency. “Encounters with the Wanderers, Survive’s base enemy type, are similarly bland. I’ve grown attached to my base and feel compelled to flesh it out with more survivors, found in rescue missions around the map, and resources for building and maintaining new structures. Nearby are my food and medicine repositories for keeping my crew healthy, and opposite my farms, several advanced gear, weapon, and gadget workshops for crafting new equipment.īeing able to manually rearrange each station to my liking and actually see my small group of NPC survivors working on their assigned tasks brought a welcome human element to Survive’s otherwise technical, menu-heavy micromanagement. My current base has small huts and tents set up near the campfire where I can sleep and cook. Each task is done at a different station that you can drag and drop to a location of your choosing, effectively letting you create your own little survival camp.

After returning from a mission, I’d repair my gear at my workbench, restock on ammo, cook whatever food I’d been able to scavenge for, boil some clean water for drinking, and check my farms and water purifiers for output.

“While things take a while to pick up, I fell into a pretty comfortable base-building routine once they did.

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