The survival game genre these days is usually a frantic first-person resource gathering to get through a horde of flesh-eating creatures. Sometimes there’s a narrative, and sometimes there isn’t. Well, a new developer, Nameless XIII, has created a mix of survival and adventure game with Ashwalkers . And when we talk about story, we should expect greatness since this developer is one of the co-founders of DONTNOD, the ones behind the Life is Strange series .
In Ashwalkers, the world is gray. The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic world (as in most survival games). A team of four must find a new shelter for a tiny population that has survived a volcanic eruption. Members must work together with their strengths and weaknesses to combat not only the harsh environment, but also the inhabitants, be they creatures or humans.
The Ashwalkers trailer may make it seem like a game with complex elements, but rest assured, it is not. In fact, it’s a very simplistic game about walking, gathering resources and camping. In short, the game is basically just wandering around and making decisions, and the decisions you make can be life and death.
As in other survival games, you have limited space for resources, which are already scarce. The four members have their own stats, such as hunger and heat, which decrease over time. If you neglect to keep their stats, the member may die because of you.
To update your stats, you must camp, and fortunately, in this world, you can do so at almost any time. At camp you can distribute the resources you gather, choose who will rest, guard the camp, talk to each other, or seek additional resources. Keep in mind that camp is not a sanctuary; things can happen during the six-hour quests, which can be random.
As the walk progresses, at certain points the team is faced with a situation where choices must be made. This is where the individual experience of the team comes into play: the immediate team leader Petra, the aggressive warrior Singh, the diplomatic scientist Kali, and the stealthy scout Nadir. While you can certainly always choose the same position in all the decisions you make, it will always not lead to what you want; that is the nature of the Ashwalkers . It has to have replayability. Hence the 34 different endings.
The thing is, it’s very hard to focus on the story or gameplay elements of Ashwalkers , when the controls are twitchy. Many times I wasn’t sure if my controller was working on choices or even just walking around. There’s also no way to control the camera, and the worst part of the journey is when my team is walking down hallways and they keep going back in and out of it because the camera has decided to pan another room in the opposite direction.
Ashwalkers is also a slow game. No, really. While a full run should take you at most an hour and a half or two hours, you may see your run increase to three. That’s because there’s no way to speed up the walk, the load times are a little slow, plus the annoyances you’ll encounter just by controlling everything in the game. It sucks because I really wanted to like this game. It looked cool, it had a good story, but the gameplay just wasn’t well implemented. However, if you really like survival games and you like a good story, you might want to consider this one.