Survival Story is a poorly made 2D retro pixel Godot kitbash from Russia, and yes, usually Russian shovelware pushers prefer Unity and Unreal, but the quality is the same (terrible) and the fake, paid reviews from the Russian review farm uncovered by Sentinels of the Store are there in full force, paid reviews to mislead you into thinking it's okay to buy this crap. That's fraud.
Anyway this garbage pixelcrap shovelware takes the form of a top down survival game where zombies take over the world and you need to scrounge through cupboards for ammo. There's a little (very badly written) narrative and not much else. Despite boasting an "open world" there's very little to do, very little in the way of gameplay or replayability, and the technical implementation is pure jank. The godawful pixelcrap graphics are a perfect analogy to the rest of the implementation... a buggy, incoherent mess of a game.
This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
Those technical flaws drag this game well below the minimum quality standards expected of a modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 13 players[/b], and the worst part is these weren't genuine players, these were the Russian fake review accounts that the developer paid to make the fake reviews. Since the fake reviews are all done, now the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
[quote][b][url=https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-notices/16-cfr-part-465-trade-regulation-rule-use-consumer-reviews-testimonials-final-rule]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/b]
This game features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian, broken English or ChatGPT AI slop, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
Due to the 2024 FTC ruling (16 CFR § 465.4, 15 U.S.C. § 45), these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law.[/quote]
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Survival Story has the cash grab price of around $7 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer.
For comparison, the $7 asking price for this game could get you games like "Stellaris", "The Elder Scrolls Online" or "Ghostrunner". No pixelcrap is worth $7. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
