Unturned

There are more zombie games on Steam than there are zombies in any single one of those games. I’m barely kidding. The zombie survival genre is… well, basically a zombie by this point, coming back to life every once in a while through cheap knockoffs that can barely be called games. Those are the titles that enrage the Jim Sterlings of this world in how TOO identical they are, having been built from the same resources.

After an hour or two in the game, you should be fully
clothed, armed, and very dangerous.
You better be prepared, the maps are pretty big.
See those mountains way far in the diatcnce here?
You can go there. You can even swim across.
And this is only a medium-sized map!

Unturned has the most basic concept of them all: Your place has been struck by "something" that turned everyone else into zombies. You’ve been unaffected by the virus. You have to survive by gathering resources, building a fort, learning skills and fending off zombies. Also, you start the game entirely nekkid, with very limited inventory space. Not that nudity matters much considering your character is blocky like a Minecraft protagonist.

Nelson Sexton, of Smartly Dressed Games, published the first version of Unturned in 2014, and the title was in Early Access until July 7^th, 2017, where its full version was made available. Have I mentioned that Sexton was only 16 when he released the first version? This guy’s going to go far in life. Unturned is already hailed as one of the better zombie survival games out there… which sadly also means that it single-handedly spawned a whole wave of cheap imitators. But let’s be fair and criticize this game on its own merits, not on what it’s led to, shall we?

Two words come to me when I start playing Unturned: Complete freedom. You’re given the choice to play alone or make a server with friends. If you’re a team guy, you can get yourself into a multiplayer game. The gameplay hardly changes between the two, it’s always the same concept: Survive. You’re dropped, naked, in the map you’ve selected, and you must get clothes, weapons, and so on. The concept is very simple and you’re free to explore the map to your liking. There are large areas of nature, small inhabited areas, and lots of water.

You have to keep track of many elements:

That white bar at the bottom is oxygen.
So much to remember, so much to keep track of.
All of a sudden, I'm feeling kinda thirsty.

-Your overall health, Hit Points in a percentage. Can be decreased when attacked by zombies, by falling off high ledges, getting hit by other items or bullets, or by being completely sick. Going down to 0 means instant death.

-Food and water bars, for which you must scavenge food and drinks in the inhabited areas to feed yourself and stay hydrated. A lack of nourishment or hydration will eventually spell your doom.

-A sickness meter. Getting attacked by zombies will decrease that meter, and so will stepping into irradiated zones. Seek hospitals and medicine if this meter goes down.

-A stamina counter. Running or jumping uses up stamina. Depleting that bar doesn’t cause many issues, although a player will need some time to refill it afterwards. It does, however, deplete the food and water bars a little faster.

-Last but not least, oxygen. Only really needed when your survivor is going underwater.

So many things that are seemingly useless in the
inventory... I should do some cleanup. Impressive, however,
how much stuff this guy can carry around at once.

As with most zombie survival games, the maps come with a system that spawns items at random in inhabited areas, and you have to make do with what you find. Maybe you’re unlucky and all you can find is a stupid rake to defend yourself. Or maybe you get a gun, which would be excellent – were it not that you need to find the proper bullets for it first. Not to mention that shooting is too noisy and will alert other nearby zombies. I’ve personally found myself a fondness for using a crossbow. Noiseless, with multiple arrows that can be used 20 times each, as long as you can go pick them up again – or repair them with materials. Sure, it takes some skill to shoot at the zombies’ heads, but that’s okay. I trained on apples.

Too bad I can't get a permanent Ash Williams upgrade.

And if that’s not an option, you could just tour the nearby farms in search of a chainsaw. It kills messily and bloodily, but it keeps hitting the target and will make quick work of most zombies in the way. Bonus, no need to refill it with gasoline and you can chop down all the trees in sight. This actually brings me to my next points.

Fishing is one quick way to get food...
...provided you have a campfire to
cook it on and some cooking skills.
Man, why is it s complicated?

Gathering resources is important, probably even more so than anything else; there’s only so much food you can get from the nearby villages, and not all of it is necessarily edible. You can find vegetable seeds as well; but without a place to plant them, an easy way to water them, and something to protect them, you won’t get much food from them. The large, complex crafting system available in this game allows for all sorts of items, from a rain collector to fences for your garden. You can hunt and fish for more food, but as with real life, it’s dangerous to eat those raw, so you need something like a campfire to cook them. And for a campfire, you need… Who said “Your ex-girlfriend’s house”? Who’s the sick bastard who said that? No, you need wood! And what else is wood good for? …Who said “bashing your enemy’s head in”? Well, okay, if your enemies are zombies (like in, say, Unturned), maybe. But most of all, wood is useful in building houses! Yes, you can build your own fortress in this game, as long as you have all the necessary resources for that purpose. That means chopping a lot of trees. You can build a very respectable home, away from where the zombies stay, and live relatively well. Until you’re missing something and have to go back out into the zombie-infested wilderness, of course.

....Geez. I just came here for a pint of milk!

There are many maps available, and most of them are pretty large, although some are solely used for multiplayer. Germany, Prince Edward Island, Russia, Washington and Yukon are available, and so are Hawaii for the main solo maps – although there’s a few more ranked as Misc, being more like Player-versus-Player maps not built for single-player.

Full moon zombies are so much more fun to kill.
Their eyes are like flashing lights revealing evil in the darkness.
Plus the EXP bonus, that helps.

This one is, quite literally, a zombie on fire.
And it's freaking gigantic.

Of course setting up base and surviving for days is a major part of the gameplay, but are there levels and bosses here? Levels, not so much, but bosses, yes. The games follow a day-and-night cycle every 48 minutes, and there is a chance that one nighttime part will be special; the full moon will make zombies tougher to kill, stronger when attacking, and you can spot, in special places, giant zombies that are far more dangerous than the others. These guys can toss cars and other stuff at you! They’re the closest to mini-bosses that you’ll see here – and even then they’re extremely hard to kill. Are there bosses, though? Why, yes! Although getting to them involves long quests that require great knowledge of the game’s system and a character equipped to face the trip required to finding these monsters and defeating them. In other words, don’t believe that you can go and face them on Day 1. You need multiple day cycles before you’re properly ready for that. They’re bosses for a reason!

Ah. it's good to see other unturned survivors!

But of course, as I mentioned, the single-player wide open zombie survival sandbox isn’t the only way to play; through servers, you can play with friends. Or with strangers. As a matter of fact, playing with others completely changes the dynamics of the game! You’re now a whole group trying to survive, so you can help each other in gathering stuff, farming food… and killing zombies. Any group that spends long enough working as a team will look like an elite commando, raiding places in groups to get all the best gear, and then equipping that gear to their members who need it. That’s the best part, really. It can make the game a lot more fun, although… there is a different way to play.

There are technically no downsides to becoming a bandit, as the community has gotten to calling them. Bandits can be single players or groups, but they all have something in common: Their goal is to have fun… by attacking, killing and looting other players who have teamed up to survive. Maps go from zombie survival to actual player-versus-player when bandits come out to play. Yes, put all the gear lying around in the hands of a guy who treats this like a game where players can kill each other, and you basically get the horror movie characters who go crazy from the constant horror, turn on the good guys and kill some of them. "Screw the rules, everyone else is a zombie and we’re doomed anyway!" In fact, there are Steam achievements for killing other players! Sure, there is a karma meter of sorts, but it doesn’t impact the gameplay in any way aside from telling other players whether you’ve been naughty or not. Bandits are still free to snipe at others from afar, or plan hits on clans of survivors…

Plenty of stuff you can craft!
You can basically craft yourself a house if you want to.

Really, a lot of things can be done in this game, which is why it’s so well-regarded. Its creator and his team have been listening to the community’s ideas and implementing some of them over the course of the past three years. The input and comments of fans is put into consideration, and it helped make a better product. Now, is the game hard? Yes, it’s very, very difficult. You’ll need to die a couple times before you’ve understood the details of the gameplay. Unless, of course, you’ve been playing survival games for a while, as it’s a genre that tends to stay the same regardless of the game. And Unturned is easier to hate for what it led to than for what it actually is.

It’s a surprisingly complex and complete game, with a lot of options that may not have normally been in survival titles. Your first day cycles will be spent scavenging food and medicine, building weapons and killing zombies, although the idea is to try to avoid doing this once you’ve set up your base and started harvesting your own resources. You can spend the whole single-player mode visiting places, killing zombies in the name of a self-imposed challenge, or you can try to play safe and build your base and live happily away from dangers. Or do a bit of both, then chase the boss zombies and try to defeat them!

The game uses ragdoll physics, though it sometimes leaves
zombies and killed animals in funny positions.
Speaking of, yes, you can hunt animals for food, hide
(and, in the case of cows, milk) to help you survive.
Who cares if you kill a cow? Everyone else is a
zombie anyway!

Of course, it suffers from the same issues as most other survival games – the meters empty too quickly, and you’re often left with very few options. The harder the game setting (you can choose between Easy, Medium and Hard), the quicker the meters become a problem. It’s not that these meters don’t have a reason to exist, they do; it’s the whole point of survival. But it’s a question of balance whether or not they empty out too quickly. I felt the meters were fine in the Easy difficulty, but would empty a little too quickly on higher difficulties. You’re also left to trust the Random Number God, as the game is programmed in such a way that items will appear at random in important places, and if you don’t find what you need, there isn’t much you can do about it. Thankfully, you can usually find what you need to build stuff by yourself, and you can probably go far in the game without dying if you learn to use everything to your advantage.

I don’t know if there’s much else to say about this one, really; Nelson Sexton and Smartly Dressed Games are frequently adding updates to it, constantly including more content, and it’s good to know that the developers are still trying to improve their product.

Smiling in the face of untold horrors.
That, my friends, is a protagonist I can rally behind.

Now, yes… the sad part about all this. Unturned is a good game. So good, in fact, that game development software Unity made a pack of resources, called UnitZ, based on the game (not usable in Unturned; merely based on it), so that other people could make their own blocky zombie survival title. Steam was then flooded by uninspired zombie survival titles that all looked the same, played the same, and did everything the same way. Is Unturned to blame? No. Is Unity to blame? Not quite, as they only made the resources available. Is Steam to blame? Partly, since they made it so easy to publish a game on Steam (and this was in the days of Steam Greenlight, where almost anything could go). The blame mostly lies in uninspired rookie game creators who thought they could just use the resource pack, slap a new name on it, make very basic changes and just sell the result for a quick buck. Unturned is a passion project. These copycats are not. Get the real deal, it’s better than all of those combined – alas, maybe all of these poor copies have turned you away from all zombie survival games… Which is a shame, because Unturned is worth trying. On top of that, it’s free, so you won’t waste money if you turn out not to enjoy it.

So yeah, that covers it all. See you next week for a different game.