Zombie Survivals are all the rage these past few years and unturned is another one with its own twist.
Unturned is a zombie survival game, much like DayZ but the graphics look more like Minecraft. Unturned has some similarities to many other zombie survival such as random loot scattered throughout the map, zombies and crafting. Unturned comes in two modes. Single player and multiplayer. Single & multiplayer comes with two maps, an island somewhere in Canada and an arena map in the wilds. The island called “PEI” is a map filled with towns, farms, checkpoints, airports and military bases. Each comes with a certain amount of zombies and loot that is randomly generated every time you login. Certain loot spawns in specific locations, Traps & high powered guns in bases and clothing in towns. The arena is the more pvp focused map where you spawn on an island with a few items around you and everywhere you go is just wilderness. The arena map is more used towards multiplayer. In order to connect to multiplayer you need the IP address of whoever is hosting the server. In dayz there are many public servers to join and start looting and killing. In unturned however there isn’t a list of servers to choose from. You must find out the IP address from the person you wish to join. The lack of public server list to choose from is a thumbs down for this game. If you choose to host a server and let your friends join, know this, there is an option to sync and unsync. This means that you get to choose whether to carry your character’s stats on to the server you are joining. If you host the server whatever you do in terms of progression stays on that server. So if you join someone else with sync on then you keep your characters stuff he is currently carrying. Multiplayer should best be enjoyed with friends or host a community server for some random Walking Dead scenarios. In single player you can go out and try to survive. But you must learn the basic of surviving. You will need food, water, and not die. There are various loot where you can eat and drink but eventually you will need to grow your own and make a home. Single player and multiplayer is pretty much the same thing just the only difference is multiplayer.
The games comes with a simple crafting and skill system. Skills include sneaking, gun mastery, melee, and basic survival, etc. Crafting is simple, two empty slots, a tool slot and a result slot. If you don’t want to use the internet to find recipes you can do loads of experimentation. You can tell if it is a incompatible result when there is nothing shown in the result slot. Skills are easy to unlock and all require experience points which you can get by killing and crafting. Mastery of all skills will take some time as the later levels of the skills require mass amounts of exp.
So far I find this game enjoyable in the single player stand point. You can get the freedom to experiment and build so many things. The skills system lets you choose what kind of character you want to be in the beginning. Do I want to be a melee master? Or do I want to just pew pew all over the place? Or do I just want to survive longer? There are many combination of skills that benefit you and if you manage to stay alive you can be master of all. With the crafting system you can make multiple structures of your design. A castle? Sure! A garage? Go ahead! A small shack? Umm ok you can do more but this is your play through so have at it. But be aware the more stuff you have in the world, the less frames you are going to have. Building a house is simple, it comes with parts like a foundation, window, etc. Building a home is similar to the First version of Rust. Place one foundation down and when you place the second one down it will snap with the first.
Overall I find Unturned to be an enjoyable survival game with all the basic mechanics, food, water, health, toxicity, energy. I suggest playing this game in the single player mode. Multiplayer at its current state is mainly for fun with friends or a community type of hunger games. After learning everything and finding all the loot, I found it boring over time. No more new discoveries. What I suggest, for multiplayer, to the Dev is implement public servers, like DayZ. For both single and multi, add procedurally generated maps so that each person has a different map to explore. Though it is still an early access game, it has potential to be a great game.
Pro: simple mechanics, no bugs, punching zombies to death, minecraft art style
Con: no public servers, no variety in landscape
I give it a 7 out of 10.