[h1]Introduction[/h1]
[code]Please note: This review is only a very short version of my full review of Triton Survival's current Early Access state, available at [url=https://saveorquit.com/2019/06/27/preview-triton-survival/]Save or Quit[/url].[/code]
Triton Survival is the latest indie survival-crafting game written in Unity, this time from DreamsSoftGames. I don't mean to sound jaded, but there seem to have been quite a few of them lately!
In the case of Triton Survival, you play the role of an unnamed soldier in the year 2114, sent from Earth to Triton (one of Neptune's moons) to guard an alien portal that has been established there, and also to use said portal to travel around Neptune and its moons to destroy other similar portals and remove an invading alien force. (Very little of this is explained in game, but that's what I took away from the Steam store page, anyway.)
You begin the game on an intriguing representation of Triton. There's an empty base that looks like it could have been built by humans, a rank of cool-looking vehicles sitting there, idle, and some very colourful flora dotted about the place. Your HUD provides a readout showing the next alien invasion -- how, exactly, it knows the time of said invasion is not revealed -- so you'd better hurry up and establish some sort of defensive perimeter.
[h1]Triton, hey?[/h1]
So a quick Google search revealed the following known facts about Triton:
1. It has an average surface temperature of 34.5 degrees Kelvin.
2. It has almost no atmosphere and is within Neptune's magnetosphere; it's very unlikely to be able to support life at all.
3. It has a surface area of approximately 23018000 square kilometres.
It seems to be a very strange choice of setting for a survival-crafting game involving trees, flowers, pools of yellow water, and exotic flora and fauna, as well as a human protagonist. It's also rather disappointing that the playable area of Triton in Triton Survival appears to be measureable in single-digit square kilometres (I'm hesitant to say 1 km^2, but I expect it couldn't be much more than that).
Of course, suspension of disbelief is all part of playing computer games so I'm willing to let the rather unbelievable environment and setting slide. In my opinion, though, a good survival-crafting game needs a vast, interesting, and interactive world, and unfortunately Triton Survival simply doesn't provide that, or at least not from what I've seen so far.
You see, the portal you're protecting in the game can also be used to travel to Neptune and its other moons, so I can only assume there is (or will be) more to explore upon reaching that stage, but actually getting to the point where you can use the portal for travel is dull and repetitive, and made all the worse by the tiny environment provided by Triton itself.
[h1]Pros and Cons[/h1]
Pros:
+ Interesting flora and fauna, with nice (and colourful!) graphics
+ My first enemy "wave" was fun
Cons:
- Poorly balanced: grind, grind, grind for little reward
- Tiny world
- Needs a lot more content; there's just not much to do here yet.
[h1]Verdict[/h1]
Triton Survival feels like it's on the right track to becoming an interesting survival-crafting game that's worthwhile playing, but it has a long way to go. At the moment it seems to be full of grind simply for the sake of grind, and that's no fun; survival-crafting grind has to be suitably rewarding in order to feel like a worthwhile task, and in Triton Survival it's simply not.
I expect most of the bugs will be addressed through Early Access, so I'm not even going to bother mentioning them individually, and I'd hope the interface will be massively reworked, since it's clunky enough to be annoying and ugly enough to detract from the game as it is. But the big problems at the moment are lack of content, tiny world size, and that unrelenting and unrewarding grind.
Definitely keep an eye on Triton Survival if you're a fan of the genre and you've played the more established titles, but I wouldn't recommend actually purchasing the game until there's a lot more to do and the gameplay has been significantly rebalanced.
[h1]Pause[/h1]
[code]For more game reviews, visit [url=http://saveorquit.com/]Save or Quit[/url].[/code]
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[h1]Addendum: "But it’s Early Access!"[/h1] - 20190629
I’ve had a few annoyed comments from people -- developers, fellow reviewers, and other people simply wanting to voice their opinion -- reading my past reviews of Early Access titles, implying that I don’t understand Early Access and I should be more lenient, so I wanted to add a few words about this topic here.
I've played and reviewed many Early Access games on Steam and their quality is immensely variable. Some developers who choose to follow the EA path put pre-alpha-level builds up in order to get visibility and community feedback as early as possible, while others hold off on even an EA release until their games are in late-beta: most definitely feature-complete and ready for a final quality assurance pass. Most are somewhere between the two.
This makes (p)reviewing an Early Access game a challenge. An honest reviewer can only review what’s available at the time, but in boiling everything down to that final Steam review decision — to recommend or not — I feel some concessions do sometimes need to be made for the state of the game; after all, there is an understanding that the game being reviewed is incomplete. Unlike a fully released (“finished”) game, an Early Access title is expected to improve.
So Early Access reviews are always a bit of a gamble, much like the decision of whether to purchase a game in EA or not. In making such a gamble, it often pays to spend some time investigating the game’s past and the developer’s public presence and attitude towards it, helping to make a more educated guess regarding what’s likely to happen with the game during the Early Access process.
In writing this review I did exactly that, as best I could with the time and resources available to me, including reading what is currently available on the game’s Steam store pages. Even when this research adds up to a favourable impression of a game's future, I can still only review what is here right now.
So, while I appreciate that this game is in Early Access and is unfinished, it would be wrong of me to give it a positive review solely for that reason. I've reviewed what was available for purchase at the time of my review. It may get better, in which case I hope to be able to return to it and update my review appropriately. But it may not.
dreamssoftgames, I really appreciate being given the chance to review Triton Survival, and I also appreciate and understand your comments, but I can't review what's not here yet! My review reflects the state of the game as it was at the time of the review. For Triton Survival, that state is basically that of a tech demo.
