“Zombie games” are like last gen’s WWII games — they’re all over the place, and most are pretty forgettable. EKO Software and 505 Games just released a new zombie game that is played from a top down perspective. In How To Survive (H2S), you choose from one of three pre-built characters and face endless waves of zombies across four different islands as you try to find a way to escape. It’s more of an adventure game than survival horror, but wisely managing your limited twenty-five slot inventory and keeping your thirst, hunger, and fatigue levels in check is vital. H2S also has an interesting, although not very robust, crafting system in which you combine a variety of materials found on the island to make new items, including weapons.
At the outset of your adventure, you can choose between three characters — Kenji, whose stats, such as Stamina and Strength, are basically all equal and vanilla, Abby, who isn’t very strong but is very quick, and Jake, a big dude who can’t run for more than a couple of seconds at a time, but he can dish out a beating. I chose Jake, and by the time I made it to the fourth island, I was glad I did as the difficulty there ramps up a good amount. There is an XP system and players are able to choose from four different paths on a skill tree. You can also reset your skill tree if you desire, but I found my path of upgrading my body’s needs, which help reduce the rise of hunger, thirst, and fatigue, and then focusing on things like aiming and finding items on slain zombies, worked well. XP is earned with every kill, with bigger foes earning upwards of twenty times the XP of the standard zombies. Completing story objectives also nets you big chunks of XP, and at load screens, which are relatively rare given that they only appear when you decide to travel from one island to another, you can answer questions about the gameplay to earn a little more XP.
Earning XP and leveling up often comes at just the right time, because when you reach a new level, your health meter fills up, too. So keeping your health, hunger, thirst, and fatigue meters full, or nearly so, is obviously important. If you avoid clearing out a safehouse and sleeping, you will have a hard time sprinting, an ability you will dearly miss. Failing to find food to eat — be it special plants or meat from an animal that you have killed (and then cooked), will result in weak attacks and poor aiming ability, which will result in a swift death. To quench your thirst, you need to find wells, a few of which are located on each island. At these wells, you can easily fill up your thirst meter, but better yet, keep a bottle or jerrycan in your inventory and you can take water with you, assuming you don’t have it full of gasoline for your handmade chainsaw. Or, a certain plant can give you both a thirst and health boost. Given that there isn’t a storage system and you can only carry twenty-five unique items (i.e., you can carry whatever number of any one item, but only twenty-five unique items), managing your inventory is a constant and important task. At times, you will find items like a truck tire that you can, assuming you have a machete or handmade axe, cut into pieces. At the time, you might not know what the heck to do with these pieces, so you’re unsure if you want to hang on to them or drop them. It’s a sort of fun balancing act that you’ll be doing throughout the game, but I never felt like I was having to micro-manage things too much. Plus, the inventory screen pops up instantly, with no delay. Also note that certain characters can make use of items that others cannot, such as certain plants that Abby can use for temporary boosts, for example.
Keeping the basics inline is easy enough, but how to combine your items, especially those that require four, five, or even six parts, could have been confusing. As is, it’s maybe a little too simplified, in that you just have to go to your inventory (press Circle, which pauses the in-game action), and select your item (X), and then choose “Combine” if it’s shown. The game will basically combine things for you if you have the right material, and, if you have found the appropriate page of the Survival Guide. The Survival Guide is a tutorial and reference-like item that you find pages of throughout the game, mostly during the first few hours. This book was written by Kovac, an interesting NPC who looks like Moltar from Space Ghost Coast To Coast. He’s been on these islands for sometime now. He’s responsible for setting up the safehouses where you can sleep at and I found his character and the presentation of the Survival Guide to the player a strong positive for the overall experience. He’s not the only NPC, though. There is also Ramon, a knowledgeable survivor who amputated his own leg after it was bitten. He keeps your character moving in the right direction as far as tasking him with the main story quests, which are to retrieve various items to repair a plane. There are other, less important NPCs you encounter, too.
While the action and inventory management are the primary gameplay elements, I thought the game’s story and its characters were pretty well done, too. Even though the tasks, whether they are the main story ones or the optional side missions given to you by monkeys on the island (who give you a nice inventory item in return for fetching or crafting something for them), are all of the fetch-nature, they’re perfectly serviceable for the type of game this is. In other words, while perhaps not as deep or thought-out as maybe you’d like to see, the quests themselves are still entertaining. I’d go as far as to say that very little about this game isn’t entertaining. The first time I went to play I intended to only drop in about an hour — six hours later, and I realized that I was letting my own fatigue meter drop to dangerously low levels. Kidding aside, H2S does an excellent job of getting the player right into the mix and then gives them plenty of reason to stick around. EKO accomplished this by combining a good story with fun melee and ranged action, balanced difficulty, a simple yet sufficient inventory and crafting system, and a map system that ensures you never get lost. The hours I have spent playing H2S were all “forward progress” — practically no checkpoint loading and replaying of scenes or areas, just steady, enjoyable gaming.
The action is a good combination of melee and ranged (aka distance) attacks. You start with a simple wooden stick and attack by pressing R1, or holding R1 to charge up a bigger hit. This will get you by for the first hour or so, but once you get the machete and the axe, things start to pick up. You’ll learn how to craft your own guns, too, including a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, precision rifle, etc. All of these require multiple parts which can be hard to manage in your inventory while still having room for essentials. Ammo comes from miscellaneous nails and bolts that are picked up randomly from slain zombies, and as long as you don’t waste ammo, keeping ammo in stock usually isn’t a problem. Some enemies, like the fat Bombers, are best handled at range, but others, like the zombie soldiers with helmets and body armor, are best handled with the chainsaw. Using L1 to change between melee and distance weapons is fast, and then within those categories Triangle is used to cycle to the proper weapon. L2 is used along with the d-pad for quick access to certain items, including those that can heal you up. The action takes a more deadly turn when nightfall sets in the game, too. There are these fast, melee creatures that will attempt to slash at you in the darkness; the only way to repel them is by shining a light onto them. Fortunately, you have a flashlight that requires no maintenance or batteries, but its beamwidth is small enough that you have to be ready to spin on your heels to cast light on a creature sneaking up behind you.
H2S includes offline co-op with a second player with whom you can play through the story. I haven’t hardly tried this mode yet, though. Additionally, you can partake in the eight challenge missions offline too. These same challenges can be played online, but in limited testing with that, the connections have been somewhat laggy and/or disconnecting, possibly just bad luck on who I’ve been connecting with, though. The Challenges are cool in that you are given a time limit and also a simple objective: get to the airplane. Players are dropped into some part of one of the islands with an empty backpack. Miscellaneous items are scattered about and you’ve got to book it to the plane as efficiently as you can.
I did experience a few single player bugs with H2S, but nothing game-breaking. A few times, when I was walking near the shoreline, I suddenly lost control of my character as he walked robotically away from the water in a straight-line for around three seconds. Another time, a boss-like character knocked me off of a small rock and into the water; a moment later I respawned right next to him on the rock, undamaged. This same boss-character can pick up and throw other zombies at you. One time I was using a large rock as coverage, but, the boss was still able to throw the zombie at me because the airborne zombie literally clipped through the rock on its trajectory towards me. Aiming can be a bit of a pain too when you’re trying to target one enemy, like a Bomber, that’s right next to other enemies; this is especially tricky with the Boomerang.
With that, let’s get to the summary…