Written by Patrick Orquia
Title: The Survivalists
Developer: Team 17
Publisher: Team 17
Genre: action adventure, strategy
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: 09 October 2020
Price: $19.99
The movie Cast Away is one of my favorite movies. In this movie, a FedEx delivery guy played by Tom Hanks got stuck in an island after the plane he was on crashed to the sea. On the island, he managed to brave the elements and was able to survive for years despite being alone, and in the process, he was able craft tools to help him in gathering food and materials that he can use for shelter and clothing and whatever he needs to survive.
In the end, Tom Hanks survived and surprised everyone who gave up on him and he showed up alive again. It is a movie about hope and determination to survive and all is lost.
I wonder how I would fare if that was me…
The Survivalists, a new game from Team 17 that is sort of a spinoff game from their other game series, The Escapists, is all about surviving on an island and being crafty in order to achieve it. The game is not as brutal as Cast Away and you get to play your character in the comfort of your own home, or if you’re playing it on the Switch, anywhere. It is a whole lot light-hearted and less serious in tone than Cast Away, but the nitty-gritty of how to survive on your own is here: crafting tools to gather food and materials for shelter and workbenches to create more tools to create more stuff, so on and so forth. It is fun to play, and even more fun if you spend a whole lot of time in it.
The game is presented in a rather cutesy art style, with cel-shaded aesthetics and very well-animated. The soundtrack is also really good, evoking the mood and ambience of the environment you are in, whether you are in a forest or in the beach or desert or near a volcano. The performance of the game is also top-notch on the Switch, with minimal hiccups here and there but nothing too noticeable.
You play as a cast away character, which you can customize at the start of the game. You start on a shore of an island, where your raft ended up getting washed in after a storm. The game has an astounding amount of tutorials to bombard you with, but you will need them all to really maximize your enjoyment of the game (you have access to all the tutorials right at the start if you want to read them all before actually playing the game or if you want to review them). These tutorials are presented gradually throughout your playthrough as you encounter new things or situations that you will need to know.
Aside from gathering materials in your environment, you can also hunt and fish for food (and also for other materials like fur, etc.). Once you unlock the blueprint for weapons such as the bow and spear, you can hunt fast-moving animals such as rabbits and cattle and the like. Meat can further unlock new food recipes, and the more complex a recipe is, meaning the more ingredients it needs, the more benefits you can get out of it, like getting more HP. You can also now be able to defend yourself against the natives who will try to defend their turf and try to hurt you if you go near them. There are also some animals, like tigers, that will go after you and hurt you a lot unless you kill them first. So hunt or be hunted, and get really good at it.
By the way, you have to watch out for your HP and stamina. When your HP gets depleted, you faint, drop all of the stuff that you carry, and you end up waking up on the last bed that you slept on. You can go back and take back the items you dropped, but depending on how far away your bed is from the play where you faint, you may lose quite some progress. Depleting stamina, on the other hand, will not make you faint, but you will have to wait for a few seconds for it to get fully restored before you can go back to whatever it is that you are doing.
This continuous cycle of gathering materials to craft stuff to get more materials to craft more stuff can be very tedious, more especially so if you are just playing alone. Luckily, in the game you can befriend monkeys, which you can then teach different task to ease your burdens. You can teach them to cut trees or gather materials or even fight alongside you (You are not the only one on the island trying to live a life, so you will encounter a few of these “neighbors” later on. More on this later). You can even teach them to interact with one another and the more monkeys you bring into your gang, the more stuff that you can do and automate.
One big difference of The Survivalist to Cast Away is in the game, you will have to visit multiple islands, as you will to have all the resources that you need in just one. You will eventually be able to unlock blueprint for a raft and a sail, and once you have the materials needed, you can craft one and visit your next island to explore, then go to the next ones once you have fully explored it. You can build a home base to fully settle down in so that you have somewhere to put all of your chests with different materials and tools and it and house your army of monkeys. If you so want, you can build multiple ones and just teleport from one to the next once you have unlock teleportation. One negative thing about having a home base is that you will now be subject to raids by enemies who will try to wreck and steal your stuff, so you better be ready for it. You can set up traps and walls to stop them, but a few will still manager to get into your base eventually. Again, you can teach your monkey friends to fight for you, but be careful because, like you, they can get hurt. They don’t die, but once their HP gets depleted, they will be get sidelined for a few minutes until they fully recover.
Speaking of enemies, the game also has some dungeon-like areas that you can explore. Before doing so, make sure that you are fully equipped, and so are your monkey friends. These areas are usually dark and got a good number of enemies who will try to hurt you at first sight, so you have to kill them right away. This dungeon-exploring business is quite tedious and is really not worth the trouble, to be honest, but if you have up to three other friends to join you to play local co-op mode, it is a whole lot more fun.
Yes, this game, like the Escapists games, have multiplayer mode. While commanding an army of monkeys could be fun, it is still much better playing with human friends, as you don’t have to individually program them to automate tasks. Your friends can do multiple stuff at a time and switch from one task to another on the fly independently, as humans do in real life. You can also scream at each other and laugh together, and that kind of fun is priceless. I think this game is really designed to be played by multiple people, because playing the game alone is just tedious, especially in the opening hours, since the game has not fully opened up yet to you and you will have to grind hours upon hours to get more and more stuff. For people who don’t have friends to play this game locally, you can host a multiplayer party or join others online. There is really no excuse for you to play this alone, but, as the saying goes, there is comfort in loneliness, so if you just want to play the game alone, that’s all cool.
REPLAY VALUE: High
PROS
- Excellent visuals with cel-shaded cutesy aesthetics
- Excellent soundtrack that evoke different moods
- Wide variety of customization options
- Lots of blueprints and recipes to unlock, encouraging you explore the world
- Expansive tutorials about everything in the game
- Teaching monkeys to do different tasks is fun and will take some load off your shoulders
- Plays solidly on the Nintendo Switch, both in docked and handheld modes
- Playing with others, especially locally, is much more fun
CONS
- Very repetitive gameplay
- Very tedious to play alone, especially in the opening hours of the game
- The limited inventory space that you have in your person can be very frustrating
- The UI can get quite confusing at times, especially when you are playing in handheld mode
- You get no almost no directions on where to get materials for crafting and you have to discover them, which can also be very frustrating since you don’t know where to look for them
- The whole cycle of crafting for new materials to get new once and the whole process of it all make the game more of a chore than being enjoyable
- Dungeon-like areas are not worth the trouble to explore, especially alone
- Playing the game alone, in general, is not really fun at all
RATING: 4/5 me and my monkeys
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