Islanded

Survival games are quite popular lately, especially if you enjoy trying to make it in the wilderness with nothing but natural resources to help you. Whether it’s DayZ, Minecraft or Starve With Me, there are many examples of games that punish the player just for playing. On the other hand, the whole point is for the task to be as difficult as possible, in order to feel good about yourself once you manage to do it.

Islanded is a first-person survival game in which the goal is quite simple: stay alive for as many days as you can, while doing your best to raise a shelter, find food and stay hydrated. The game is in a pretty rough state at the moment, given the fact that it’s just a Beta version, but there’s quite a bit of potential in the idea, at least when it comes to the crafting system and the way it works.

You start right in the middle of the forest, with no background story and no other headaches. The game provides you with a few basic tools to increase your survival chances, such as a pickaxe, an axe and a torch. After this, you are on your own, and it’s up to you to discover how to play, what needs to be done and how can the environment help you stay alive.

As you might have already guessed, the tools you have can be used to gather resources, such as wood and rock. These can then be processed even further by making sticks and similar objects, which come in handy when you need to raise a shelter. You can even upgrade each piece of your house to reinforce it, such as to replace the sticks with heavy lumber and protect yourself even better from what’s out there.

On the other hand, there’s absolutely nothing out there, at least not yet. You do not have to worry about animals, zombies or anything else, although there is a day/night cycle that looks beautiful. The lack of a challenge can be a problem, but we can only hope that the developer keeps at it in the future. On top of it all, it’s worth mentioning that the inventory system is very awkward and cumbersome, since you cannot seem to pick up an individual item off the ground, which leads to a lot of frustration when you’re out of room.

All things considered, Islanded is a tad too empty at the moment to be properly judged, but it appears to be on the right path. Hence, as long as a lot more content is added and a few of the inconveniences are fixed, this could certainly become a popular survival game.