How to Survive 2 (Video Game)
Ted Hentschke
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Developed by EKO Software
Published by 505 Games
Available on PC through Steam
Rated M for Mature
The last few years has been pretty good for the zombie game market. There are still a lot of shitty zero budget zombie shooters that flood the indie market, but those are slowing down now that zombies aren’t really “hot” anymore. While we all remember big titles like Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, and Dead Island, people that payed attention to games without “Dead” in the title will remember some pretty cool indie titles. For example, How to Survive. The top down, dark comedy action horror game is remembered by many for its lighter take on bloody dismemberment. What the game lacked for in killer visuals it made up for in simple, intuitive, and challenging gameplay. The crafting was never too complicated, but rewarding enough to keep you hunting for the pieces you need to upgrade.
I only beat the game once, which actually puts me at the least amount of playtime among my friends. I have several friends that beat it with every character, most of them taking advantage of the game’s two player mode. I learned my lesson from this, and decided to play How to Survive 2 with my girlfriend this time. After about an hour struggling to figure out why she should be caring about this instead of her newly created World of Warcraft character, she abandoned me.
Frankly, I can’t really blame her. How to Survive 2 is a significantly different game from the original. Kovak is still his goofy self, and you still kill zombies from an isometric perspective. Other than that, it’s almost unrecognizable.
Starting How to Survive 2, you’re plopped into the middle of a forest without any explanation as to why. You hear Kovak speaking to you from a nearby loudspeaker, so you’ll interact with it to get your first mission. You’re teleported to a Diablo dungeon style map, where you kill some zombies before being teleported back. “Cool,” I thought to myself, “guess that was the tutorial. Wonder where they want me to go next.” You’ll start the next mission, and be teleported to another closed map, this time set in a city. It might soon dawn on you that this is the entire game. Gone is the island hopping, persistent open world of How to Survive. How to Survive 2 is a series of grindable, repeatable, bite sized missions.
Opaque overlay map… objective reminders that turn green when I’ve finished… out of the way empty spots with maybe a single extra resource… yup, I’m in a grind-fest.
Instead, the large map where the overall game takes place is now a large space for you to build your camp. I guess that How to Survive 2 took a look at Minecraft, and decided it needed to refocus from a tight and interesting game to a zombie survival camp building simulator. Okay, sure, I can dig that. I can see that being fun. You and four friends all building up the camp together, slowly expanding your base into an impenetrable fortress? Cool!
And maybe that is cool, but I’ll never know. At this point, my girlfriend had grown tired of doing the same missions over and over. We got to a point where we were trying to build a forge, and had to repeat the same mission three times to get enough iron. After being the trooper that she is and finishing it with me, she let out a heavy sigh and said, “Alright, I did my part, good luck.” The game was a chore to her. She was only playing out of kindness to me, realizing that I’d have to work twice as hard without her. She went back to WoW, leaving me to the grind of How to Survive 2. When someone leaves your game to go back to WoW because it’s too grindy, you have done something terribly wrong.
At least in WoW the gear is all shiny and purple.
This is really not a game meant to be played by a single player. Building a camp is a very long and tedious process. Individual fence posts must be planted, and large amounts of mundane supplies are needed to establish a simple perimeter. On top of that, your personal level is restricted to that of the camp level. The camp can be upgraded by communal contributions of the team’s experience and goods. In a multiplayer game, it lets players contribute in pieces by donating to the team rather than buffing themselves. Playing alone, it’s just two experience bars I have to fill to level up.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the levels were fun to play. Alas, this is not the case. The maps are small and uninteresting, with way too much dead space. Being a crafting survival game, you’re immediate instinct is to explore every nook and cranny, but this rarely proves fruitful. Even rooms requiring you to pick the lock or creatively lure zombies out will often be empty. There’s so little reward to the exploration, that you might as well just complete the main objective as fast as you can to get the mission complete reward. Finish a mission, figure out what resource you need next, do that mission, repeat. The whole game boils down to a sloggy grind.
The game has some decent flashy melee kills, but seeing as how they don’t make the zombies drop extra machine parts or lead I couldn’t be bothered.
I’ve only played the game for about 6 hours, so maybe it gets better. You can ramp up each mission’s challenge by setting the zombies up to a certain amount of levels higher than you, increasing your experience reward. There is absolutely no reason not to do this. The only penalty for dying is a small percentage debuff to your bonus experience, which is far less than the amount you gain by ramping up the difficulty. Even at the hardest I could play, I was still one-shotting every zombie with my arsenal of projectile pitchforks. I’d throw my 20 pitchforks, run around collecting them, and repeat until victory. I’m sure there’s a point where they stop being instant death, but I didn’t reach it.
95% of the time, I beat a game I’m going to review. With How to Survive 2, I just stopped caring. I couldn’t bring myself to get the extra machine parts I needed to get the next level of the weapons crafting station. I knew which mission I had to repeat to get it, but I just had better things to do. If you have a group of for really dedicated friends that want to coordinate times to get together and kill zombies, have at it. I don’t see why you’d pick this when there are many better options. As a single player experience, this is a waste of time.
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