For myself, there is always something intrinsically addictive about survival games. For those of you not sure on the term, in survival games it is up to you to gather resources, build bases and fight off enemy’s all while staving off hunger, thirst, tiredness, disease and boredom. This is made all the more difficult by the fact you often have nothing except your bare hands and, if you’re lucky a couple of rudimentary tools. Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation attempts to take this formula and wrap an apocalyptic daemon setting wrapping around it. Is it looking like it will be successful? Keep reading…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj0Sgv9LmZs
There isn’t much of a storyline to worry about, more of a pre-amble to set the background for the game. In short, while you were out camping with some friends, a massive demon appeared and slaughtered all of your friends. You managed to escape, and kill the creature but this was happening everywhere. There’s a demon apocalypse happening, it’s Judgment Day.
Not willing to just lie down and accept your fate, you group up with a few isolated survivors and head to the hills, to build a base, regroup and find some way to save the world.
Like most survival games the story in this Apocalypse Survival Simulation isn’t the point of the game. Sure there’s a beginning and an endpoint, but the story is the one you make for yourself, and J:ASS (Ha Ha great abbreviation – Ed) does this in a way you’d expect. Not ground-breaking, but not disappointing.
Once you’ve chosen the difficulty level of the game plus generated a random seed (which covers the randomly generated world you’re surviving in) you’re free to generate your survivors. Each survivor will be given random traits, as well as a random look. Each survivor will be given one of 5 professions Fighter, Engineer, Priest, Survivalist and Occultist that dictates their preferred tasks and skills tree. Generally, Fighters have boosts to combat, Engineers love crafting objects, Survivors are your gatherers, Priests and Occultists are great at occult research or farming/rituals respectively.
The survivors preferred tasks (Fetch water, research, gather wood etc.) are also randomly generated. Although, you can’t tailor your characters traits and preferred tasks specifically, you can keep randomising until you get a character you’re happy with.
You can change the look of your survivors however. It’s fairly basic, a few different face types, hairstyles and clothing, but there is enough to make each person look differently. Although, as random settlers start joining the colony the chance of duplicated becomes more likely.
So, you’ve generated your starting three survivors and now you can get into the game itself.
The start of the game is initially tutorial based; you’re shown the basics of commanding your sole survivors, building the basics such as beds, food and water and research table. Your colony is basically run by way of work queues. Each survivor has a list of their preferred tasks and an order in which they like to do them. You can change this list of course, changing a survivor’s preferred task order based on the survivors skills and preferences. As you select things that need to be done, chop wood, gather food, research, fetch water etc. Your settlers will react and start automatically performing those jobs. You can redirect a survivor to do a different task if you need them to.
As far as colony management, that’s all there is to it in Judgement: Apocalypse Survival Simulation. Of course you still have the resource management side of things to manage, i.e. don’t run out of water or food, and ensure your people are well armed etc. but so far haven’t found this to be difficult to stay on top of.
Fighting demons and saving the world will not be so easily achieved without research. Luckily, your survivors are able to research items. Assigning someone to either a research bench or occult library will start generating research points. These points can then be spent on new technology and research that unlock new things. In the case of the research bench, new farms, weapons and things that help the colony survive while the Occult Library allows you to research new spells and charms, and ultimately repel the demon invasion.
Your survivors are also able to form groups and to go out scavenging, the neighbouring area for more supplies, people or simply to kill demons. Creating a group is done in simply a few clicks, and sending this party out involves choosing the area you want to explore on a map, and waiting for the group to get there. Once they’re there, they can feel free to scavenge the area without any change of combat or demonic intervention.
Ok, that’s complete rubbish there will nearly always be some demony nastiness to wade through. Combat is simple, just scout around the map until you find the demons or until they find you. For easier enemies, all you need to do is right click on the enemy to move towards and initiate combat. For the more dangerous enemies you may need to utilise nearby cover and for the really fatal creatures don’t be afraid of getting the hell out of dodge, and coming back when you’re better armed or prepared. As your survivors stay alive and perform their tasks be it gathering, combat or research they will eventually level up. After leveling you gain the opportunity to level up one of three skills trees based on their profession.
Combat is reminiscent of UFO: Enemy Unknown though not quite as complex, well not in the early parts of the game anyway. Once, your research gets underway, things do become more interesting but the one-shotted enemies at the start don’t whet the appetite like they could do.
So, that’s how it plays. How does it look? In short it’s ok. The majority of the game is a sort of slanted top-down affair, with a fog of war on all the parts you can’t see. The sort of view you’d expect to see in a nineties JRPG. The graphics have a slight comic book feel to them and with the low-key graphics the two just about work together. However, I would have liked a full 3d rotatable view, or at least isometric. This is only my personal preference.
The difficulty curve of Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation is well paced. The first time I played it, the game started off on an overly fast speed so two of my settlers had starved to death while I was still reading the tutorial screens. That’s just something to watch out for. My next game started off better and providing you keep an eye on your settlers stats (health, thirst and sleep) and ensure they get enough food, water and sleep the rest should follow as clockwork. Death by demon is also fairly likely as you go on, but as long as you take more firepower than you need this shouldn’t be a problem.
Survival games by their very nature tend to have a higher level of replayability than other games by the fairly random nature of your settlers, and course of the game in general. This holds true in the most part for Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation, I just suspect that the gameplay isn’t deep enough to warrant too many play-throughs from anyone except the most avid Survival Game fan.
Overall, Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation is looking like a worthwhile game to pop £15 quid into. It’s not the deepest and most complex survival game you’ll come across but there is enough there to keep you going for a few days. Plus, it’s still Early Access so they haven’t finished with it yet. This game has potential, and I do hope that it’s realised before its release.
