Icebroken

There are many environments out in the world that are not particularly friendly for humans, especially when it comes to the extremes. Granted, people have mastered technology over the centuries, which is why we can now survive in the harshest places out there, be it the arctic or the most hostile deserts on Earth. Even so, sometimes a lot of will is required to make it out of certain situations.

Icebroken is a survival game in which you have to help a group of people survive as they are crossing a freezing ocean on board of a mighty icebreaker. The goal is to deal with the extreme temperatures while also conserving enough energy to get the ship to its destination. Naturally, the game is far from complete, and it’s actually more of a demo at this point.

The ship has multiple compartments and eight crew members you have to keep an eye on, so it’s important to pay attention to everything happening on the crew. There’s a reactor on the ship that provides you with power, and you can reroute it from the engine in order to heat the living quarters or power the medic bay to heal your wounded crew members.

Although the reactor is quite capable of getting the ship to the destination, it really depends on how much stress you put on it. Hence, too much emphasis on the heat leaves you out of juice to complete the journey, but then again it’s useless if you get there without any crew members. You can slow down the cruising speed in order to conserve energy, but then again this exposes your crew to the elements for longer.

The interface is as simple as it gets, but it takes a while to understand what needs to be done. It would appear that the instructions only appear during the game over screen, so you have to use trial and error in order to get it right. Lastly, the graphics are very basic as well, but then again they do not really matter in this case, given the simplicity of the project as a whole.

In the end, Icebroken is a bit too short to be enjoyable for longer than a few minutes, so it would be nice for the developers to keep working on it. However, you can still have a bit of fun with the game if you are a fan of survival flicks.