Discover the thrilling gameplay and immersive storytelling of How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition in this detailed review. Is this game worth the challenge?
How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition Review
Once again, the zombie apocalypse is knocking on our door in the form of a video game, thanks to How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition. Every day, there are more and more new entertainment content based on the world of the undead that are attacking our entertainment systems.
How to Survive reminds us that we find content related to this genre of all kinds, faithful to zombie horror or parodying all the blood and gore that surrounds any work related to the destruction of these walkers.
Whatever the case, it is undeniable that we are in the midst of the zombie craze , and it is something that developers are knowing how to take advantage of. Although, as is often the case with trends, everything sneaks in between, quality products and others that are quite questionable.
Amidst all this chaos comes How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition , a variant of the survival horror game that has been trickling down to the various entertainment platforms. First it arrived last year on Xbox 360, PC and PS3 , during the summer it arrived on the Nintendo store and now it’s coming to the new generation consoles and again to PC .
We are going to tell you about our impressions of the PC version, which can be perfectly taken as a reference for both the Xbox One and PS4 versions .
Better alone than in bad company
How to Survive is a zombie survival game, and as such, it has a story of total devastation behind it. The game begins with a conversation between the captain of a boat and someone on the other side who assures him that the course he is following to the island of cliffs is the correct one.
Shortly after, a loud bang is heard and silence falls. The next sequence shows a beach on an unknown island where we lie unconscious. We quickly regain consciousness to realize that all around us there is only devastation and death.
To begin with, whatever game mode we choose, we will have to select the character that we will embody during the adventure. All of them have been dragged to this island aboard their boats, so they must also face the nest of zombies that it has become.
But each of them has their own profile, obviously, which will help us decide on one or the other before starting to play. The first of them is called Kenji , a good-looking and somewhat fragile boy who arrived here on his luxury yacht, but who hides behind him an excellent shooter with a unique aim.
Nina (who wasn’t in the original PS3 and 360 game, unless you paid for the corresponding DLC) is a mechanic at a military base who, with a few days off, had the brilliant idea of approaching this island; her strong point is engines and hand-to-hand combat. Abby , a priori the most fragile of all, a university student who should be fresh meat for the zombies, is a great athlete and also has an accurate aim, she will be ideal to escape quickly from the zombie hordes.
Finally, Jack , who is brute force in motion, is one of those big guys that zombies shouldn’t even mess with, a kind of Bud Spencer capable of delivering more than the mailman without the slightest effort. His lack of agility makes up for with his great brute strength.
A conflictive archipelago
The story takes place on a series of islands with Hispanic names , which makes us think that it is set in a Caribbean archipelago. There are seven islands in total, which we will travel through in search of a means of transport that will get us out of this hell.
How to Survive is a survival game with RPG overtones . From a mainly isometric perspective, it offers us a series of challenges and missions to overcome across these islands, in a changing environment, both in terms of the weather and the inhabitants that surround us.
During the first missions we will see how we find different yellow notebooks along the way, which when we pick them up will show us the “ Kovaks Rules ”, a kind of tutorial by volumes that will explain the basics of survival on the island. This guy Kovak is a great guy who will wait for us on one of the beaches during our first minutes on the island.
He’s one of those guys dressed in some kind of anti-radiation suit who looks like he’s been fighting zombies for a long time , and quite successfully, since he seems calm in his explanations about how to survive on the island despite the undead .
Once we have read all of Kovak’s pamphlets we will be prepared to face the reality of these islands ourselves, being able to defend ourselves effectively and being able to obtain our own resources completely independently.
Survival is a matter of the clever
This is the epicentre of How to Survive, learning the arts of survival within the different islands. This is conditioned by different indicators that will provide us with concise information about the physical and mental situation of our protagonist, which will have a direct impact when moving around it.
The key aspects that we must keep in green are the following: Health , hunger, fatigue and thirst. The well-being of our character is the sum of all these facets.
For health, there are healing plants, which we can collect and mix with pieces of cloth to make poultices to give us health. In the inventory we will see how there are different ones that we can combine with each other and cook them.
Because there are several places to make fires all over the island , it is here that we can satisfy our hunger by cooking fresh meat, for example, obtained by hunting a deer or an ostrich that we have found along the way. We can also mix plants and cook them so that our hunger gauge is full and therefore our character is satisfied.
Thirst is obviously fought by drinking liquids. There are various springs and wells on the island from which you can drink water. Also, if you bring bottles, you can fill them with water and transport it to drink in those places where there is no spring or well at hand.
Last but not least, there is fatigue , and we will fight it in the only way possible, which is by sleeping. But of course, where are we going to sleep safely on an island full of zombies ? Well, on every island there are at least one or more ruins of scientific settlements.
There is always a building in them that we can isolate by closing its doors, very much in the style of Desmond and his shelter in Lost . Once inside and eliminating the zombies that always swarm around there, we can go to sleep and thus recover from all the fatigue we have accumulated, and by closing the doors of the shelter, we will be totally safe from the zombies.
It is advisable to go to sleep at night, not because it is logical to do so at that time, but because in How to Survive , the day and night cycles follow one another, and when darkness comes, new creatures appear that are a priori much worse than the zombies themselves. It may happen that nighttime catches us in the middle of a fog or an electrical storm, the latter being especially problematic, because the numerous lightning strikes will gradually take away our health.
Hit the zombie, it’s got some bad meat
As I was saying, the night is the preferred time for a series of creatures that go beyond human forms and present themselves to us as authentic mutants. If during the day it is the zombies that stalk us, in the darkness they are joined by these disgusting and highly dangerous creatures.
But there is a remedy against these mutant creatures that works very well, unlike with zombies, and that is light. If we carry a flashlight or light a campfire, they will move away because they cannot stand the light. The problem is when we encounter several zombies and these creatures at the same time, because it is difficult to deal with one and dazzle others at the same time.
As for the available arsenal, there is also a lot of self-management here. At first we will find some sticks that serve as weapons, as well as a rusty machete that will be used to slice up zombies and make our way through some wooded areas that will require the blade of this to cut the branches.
The wooden stick will also serve as a torch if we bring it close to the fire, which in turn will allow us to set fire to the zombies and the wooded areas, which will quickly burn down and allow us to advance.
Beyond these elements that we find, we will also have the possibility of creating our own weapons. With pieces of different gadgets that we collect around the island we can build weapons of all kinds. A piece of harpoon , a broken pipe, a toolbox, fishing line, all these elements combined can give us a gun that shoots shrapnel at the zombies.
The key to How to survive is the multitude of objects that we can combine, both for the benefit of our health and to create weapons. That is why the inventory is especially important , from which we can mix all these objects. Also, if we don’t want to rack our brains, when we press combine on an object, those that are compatible for assembly are highlighted, so in this aspect, crafting is something quite simple and quick to develop.
In this PC version we played with the Xbox 360 controller. With it we were able to navigate the island perfectly. The controls are fully integrated with the on-screen messages, which allow us to control the inventory with the D-pad, run with the triggers, beat up zombies with the upper buttons or control the skill box with the red button.
The fights with any creature are quite similar to those of any beat em up , while we beat up a zombie, we will have the option to kill it with the A button, when pressing it, our character will do a fatality that will affect the horde of zombies that we have around us, stunning them to gain time.
In ranged combat, with projectile weapons, we can aim with the right stick. The more time we spend aiming at the zombie’s head, the sooner a red crosshair will appear over its head, allowing us to shoot it down with a single shot to the head.
This mid-range system is very well done, with smooth and fairly intuitive controls. However, we didn’t like the melee as much, it doesn’t handle well, and the characters’ animations are quite poor in this regard.
Game modes
How to survive has four game modes in the local game. The campaign mode , which will take us through the different islands in search of a vehicle or someone to get us out of the archipelago. The challenge mode , which asks us to survive on the island from random places with objects also arranged in an improvised manner.
The single chance mode (new, it was added as DLC in the original game, but here it comes “as standard”) that asks us to move around the island in search of vehicles that take us from one to another, also with random objects and locations. Finally, the barricade mode (also new) asks us to get enough resources to create barricades during the day around our camp.
When night falls, the zombies will appear and we must defend the wounded in the camp, who will mercilessly attack the doctor and these sick people if we are not able to neutralize them with barricades, mainly made of wooden planks that we will collect around the island.
All of these modes can also be played in local co-op. In multiplayer mode, the same types of games exist as in local mode, so the development of these games is identical except for the other players from all over the planet who accompany us.
Technical section
The truth is that How to Survive , despite belonging to a genre that is not too graphically demanding, is very good in terms of graphics. The dynamic weather, the day and night cycles, with their sunsets and sunrises are well done.
The fog, rain and night lighting effects with torches or lanterns create thousands of shadows around us, and objects gain volume throughout the island, giving us a feeling of a job well done in the graphical aspect, where in addition, the frame rate has remained very high throughout the game with the Nvidia GTX 770 that we have used.
The animations are not doing so well, they are quite mediocre, it is shocking to see such a well-cared for graphic environment with such poorly worked character movements. It seems that our protagonist lacks some skill when it comes to attacking the zombies .
The audio is not bad, it is repetitive at times, but it sets the scene well. The texts are translated into Spanish, the voices remain in English, but it plays perfectly and we understand the whole plot without problems. In general, the technical aspect is remarkable despite its regrettable animations.
Conclusions
How to survive is a good Zombie RPG , it doesn’t bring anything new to the genre, but it is well executed except for some flaws that take away realism from the characters’ movements. It can become somewhat monotonous after several missions, since they are always similar to each other, which takes away some interest.