SCORE: TBD
Pros: Strong gameplay features and relatively good graphics for an Alpha, a good balance between feeling alone in the world and feeling like no one is playing the game.
Cons: Hopefully more zombies will be added, there needs to be a penalty for killing players or at least a benefit to working together.
We recently got a chance to check out the early access Alpha of Sony Online Entertainment's new zombie Apocalypse survival MMO H1Z1, an open sandbox multiplayer where players must search, scavenge and survive. Whilst still in its early Alpha form plays can purchase the game through Steam and involve themselves in the testing process and giving feedback and thoughts during the developmental stages, however it has been stated that the final product will be completely free to play. This was the first time we were playing a survival horror multiplayer game so we had high hopes that, as fans of The Walking Dead, we were going to get to experience something like it.
Going into the game one of the things we really had to ingrain in our minds is that the game is Alpha, so often we play games that have the "Beta" tag, which are typically essentially release ready with a few tweaks needed, but Alpha is a whole different ballgame. Lots of the criticism players give about the game would be completely justifiable if the game was in Beta or release, but it's hard to be judgemental on a game in the Alpha stages when it could be a far stretch from the final product. Through our four hours of gameplay we came across bugs, glitches, incomplete features and a number of things that we didn't like about the game but can only hope that they don't reflect what we'll see at launch.
Players have various server types to choose from, mainly PvP or PvE, with their own unique rules, as well as EU or US region servers to help with latency. After choosing our server you log straight into the game, no character creation available as of yet and no female models for now.
When you log into the game you begin in the middle of the forest wilderness, if you're lucky it is daylight and if you're not then it will be night-time. Now everybody starts with a flashlight and some clothing (hooray), but that’s about it, fortunately (or unfortunately we actually thought) night-time isn't really all that dark and we'd have much preferred pitch black darkness forcing us to use the flashlight to find our way around. As it were we could see relatively easily and using it would simply draw attention to us. The only real hindrance of night when in the forest is trying to find a road, your first hope of finding some form of civilisation be at a gas station, abandoned trailer park, deserted town or even a temporary camp that may have once acted as a stronghold. There is no in game map and so you either get to know the land, get lucky or get lost (we did the latter plenty of times).
Reaching civilisation is your main priority because it is here that you will be able to scavenge the types of tools and items you need to survive. Players have an encumbrance value that is filled up with every item you pick up, so unless you find a backpack early on you can only carry a small amount of items before you are overburdened. Backpack equipped players will want to stock up on cans of food (which can be found practically everywhere) that will keep their Energy level up (if it drops to 0 you starve to death), dirty water, clean water or empty bottles to try and find water to keep up your Hydration level (if it drops to 0 you die of thirst) and cloth and supplies to make bandages and first aid kits to keep your Health level up after taking damage (if it drops to 0 you die). There's also a Stamina level that lowers when you run, theoretically you could run out stamina and be too slow to get away from anything chasing you, but we never had it dip below 80% with lots of running.
As well as the basics for survival there are a number of key items that players can also find when rummaging through trash dumpsters, abandoned homes, wrecked vehicles, warehouses and gas stations. Items such as a lighter for starting a campfire that can be used to boil your dirty water to make it clean for consumption, binoculars to let you scope out a town for enemy threats before heading in, all manner of salvage and scrap components to craft a variety of items from gear to structures. Most importantly players will want to find weapons. Fast.
Whether a bow that a player has managed to craft, a looted metal pipe, or striking lucky and finding an axe or combat knife will give you a modicum of defences. The biggest threat in the game are other players as everyone seems to have a blood lust and wants what the other guy has, even if they can't see in your backpack it is usually worth killing somebody on the off chance that they have something good; this is the mentality of survival in the game. It took a while to realise that if you don’t have a weapon then you run or you hide because you are prey to everywhere else. If you have an axe then unless you get the drop on somebody and they don't see you coming then you run or you hide, because chances are they have a gun.
Twice we approached someone that seemed like they needed help, twice we were shot in the face and could only watch as our loot was stripped from our bodies. You can’t trust anyone in the game and it is, for us, the biggest setback of the H1Z1 in it’s current (Alpha) form; there's little reason NOT to kill someone. At one point we found some large church out in the middle of nowhere and upon opening the front door took some major damage, presumably booby-trapped as inside were plenty of spike traps as well that had been left behind. Inside we managed to loot quite a few items and were really happy with ourselves and as we left the church in the distance we saw a silhouette of someone moving around in the distance. Suddenly we took damage again and realised it wasn't a trapped door but some do with a rifle trying to take out some random stranger. So we ran back inside the church, waited by the door with our newly acquired fire axe drawn in the event that our attacker would come for us and get a quick axe to the head. Sure enough he arrived, we swung with all we had, unfortunately he had a biker’s helmet on which made him pretty much impossible to kill and as we ran around the church swinging wildly at his body he quickly managed to draw out the shotgun he also had and end the battle pretty quickly.
We did manage to get a gun ourselves once, even managed to find some bullets for it, but before we even got to take a shot we were ambushed in a trailer park as we came out of the bedroom some random guy was waiting for us in the corridor and took us out with his bow.
Every time you die you respawn in the wilderness again having lost all your items that probably took you the best part of 30 minutes to an hour to find. This happens with such regularity that we didn't even get the chance to fully explore any crafting and so at times the game did start to feel like a bit of a grind. Whether it is planned for the future features we would personally say it needs to be more than a just a sandbox survival, some objectives and in game missions would make it feel like you have a goal to work towards as opposed to just seeing how long you can last this time. For friends that are playing together or clans that have formed then they will probably get much more from the game as their chances of survival are much greater and an individual death won't be as harsh as their allies can re-equip them pretty quickly, but for the solo player the game is brutal and unforgiving and, whilst realistic considering the setting, can start to be frustrating and simply not fun.
As we come to the close of this article you may well be saying "where's the zombies?" and in all honesty we were asking the same thing during our play test. A zombie will appear every so often, always on their own (as we never saw more than one at a time) and solo they just aren't even a threat to concern yourselves with, so much so we could punch one to death. Whether in the wilderness, abandoned supermarkets or even the bigger towns the zombie populous was minimal and you forget at times that it is a zombie apocalypse game. No doubt (at least we hope) that once the technical performance is stronger we'll see hordes of zombies infesting towns and roaming around, where players will have to weigh up taking the chance of fighting into a building to get some better gear, because whilst we could take one on unarmed it would be a whole different story if there were a few of them as they hit hard enough to drop you if in numbers... and they run.
There's plenty of features that are in the pipeline and we believe that once the game shifts into Beta we will have a better idea of what to expect from the final product. Whilst the game was extremely frustrating, at times tedious, it is undoubtedly addictive and when logging off feeling a little annoyed it didn't take long before we were coming up with plans on how we could do better next time. For the little that players have to pay to get in the Alpha we would definitely say it's worth it providing players aren't expecting a fully featured and polished product, can accept that the game will get better over time, but even if not it's still a pretty good game as it currently stands.
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