Survive the Fall is an interesting take on post-apocalyptic survival games, combining open-world exploration with colony-sim-style base building and management to create something that wants to exist between RimWorld and DayZ. While there are certainly aspects of the game that work, others really need improvement, leaving the game feeling more like an early access playtest than a full release. While it has some solid bones, I unfortunately feel like Survive the Fall is undercooked and desperately needs more time in development.
Survive the Fall takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland caused by a comet hitting the Earth, bringing an end to civilization and the rise of a dangerous cult and rampaging bandits.
To be totally honest, I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time in this review talking about Survive the Fall’s setting or story, because it simply was not for me. While I can see others appreciating what it had to offer, I found many elements of the game’s setting, story, and overall aesthetic to be basic, safe, and generic to a fault. This is something that a lot of post-apocalyptic games seem to struggle with—tying themselves to a familiar look inspired by games like STALKER or media such as The Walking Dead, too afraid or uncreative to branch out and make their apocalypse visually distinct, like Fallout or METRO.
That being said, I did love all instances in the game involving the nomadic wastelanders—an aesthetic I felt was far more creative and stood out from the rest of the game.
The game’s story is not helped by what I feel is poor localization in the dialogue. The manner in which the characters speak to one another—this sort of factual, bland way of speaking with a lot of strange word choices, as if put through Google Translate—really put me out of the narrative and led to a lot of zoning out. Generic character and enemy designs also did not help me get too invested in Survive the Fall’s story, and to be honest, I would struggle to tell you most of what happened.
On the gameplay side of things, Survive the Fall is a colony simulator mixed with a third-person open-world action game. It separates these two gameplay styles into a day/night system, where you spend your day building your base before plotting the next day’s expedition at night. At the camp, your characters can treat their wounds, eat, and rest. This segment plays as a colony management/base builder game where you control all of your survivors from the perspective of a resource-managing god. Those resources, however, must be collected by sending an expedition out into the open world and playing as a small squad of your characters in a top-down action game.
This is a really cool idea, and the bones of the game are great. I will say, however, that the camp management is the stronger of these two features. Exploring the open-world map and continuing the story were always the most boring parts of my playthrough. The maps are kind of small, the combat is simple (and pretty easy for a survival game—I could easily mow down big groups of enemies so long as they didn’t have, like, flamethrowers), and gathering resources is a slow, unexciting interaction prompt. Most of these expeditions led to me aimlessly wandering the open-world map and solving every issue with violence, because I was too bored to talk to most NPCs and found my machete was apparently a divine instrument of wrath that could kill a thousand men before I was slain.
The base building side of things was way more interesting. Base building in Survive the Fall works by putting down structures, which you then fill with different modules to accomplish their own tasks. A survivor shelter might have a stove. A farmhouse can have crops and a henhouse, etc. It strangely reminds me of an expanded version of Fallout Shelter, though I think comparing it to RimWorld would paint a better picture in the minds of those familiar.
There seems to be a strange disconnect between the base building and the resource-gathering mechanic present in exploration. It is very easy to fill your resource storage at your base, even if you build extra storage, because the container sizes are so low. On the contrary, you can gather huge amounts of resources in one expedition. It is not impossible to overfill your storage after one expedition. It makes one wonder what we’re doing. Are we a camp of survivors gathering all the resources that we can, or are we throwing perfectly good logs down the river because our tiny storage shed is full? If the concept is to make you think about what you’re picking up, then limiting what you can bring back would have been a better way to do it.
As far as bugs go, I didn’t face many. Survive the Fall was pretty well put together, according to my experience. While not a bug, I did face a pretty annoying death loop, as one of my partners went down during a mission early on, and the game’s checkpoint system was set moments before the game over from your teammate bleeding out. Essentially, I would fail, reload, and fail again on loop, with no way to break it except reloading an older save.
Survive the Fall is not a bad game. It combines two really good ideas to make a gameplay loop that can be very addicting. The biggest problems in the game, when you think about it, simply come down to numerical values. Storage spaces are too small. Combat is too easy, perhaps due to player damage or health. Looting can be tedious because you’re just stopping to wait out a timer. With some simple adjustments, a lot of what I didn’t enjoy about the game can be changed, so here’s hoping a future patch can fix these issues and make Survive the Fall much more worthy of your time and money.
The Final Word
Survive the Fall is a solid take on colony management that tasks you with not only keeping your survivors alive, but manually retrieving the goods yourself via open-world exploration. The latter of this combination, however, could use a bit of work, and the game’s choice of aesthetic, characters, and narrative failed to really wow me.
Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Survive the Fall. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on ourGame Reviewspage! Survive the Fall is available onSteam,Epic Games, andGoG.
