Urge is the text book definition of a hidden gem. I know this has been out for a while in early access and can't speak to what the game was like years ago, but right now this is a really great game and totally worth buying.
I have no idea how I never heard of this until the last steam sale where I was digging deep through the search lists looking for a new game, but low and behold there it was, a game with an odd thumbnail, Urge.
In the beginning I had a love\hate relationship with this one, to the point I even uninstalled it twice because I was frustrated, only to install it again a day or two later because it was just such an interesting premise that I kept telling myself to give it another go, and I'm glad I did.
This is because Urge does have some really big flaws and, at least for me, was why I kept getting so frustrated in the beginning 8-12 hours or so. Some of those frustrations continue throughout the game regardless, but it's still so much fun that you learn to deal with it. Especially because some of these issues can be dealt with, they are just annoying sometimes.
Like for one, I hate the save system. I get that the dev is going for something here, and to be fair the game IS balanced around this save system well enough. None the less, there is a reason games went away from having a save system with no autosaves, and only allowing manual saves in certain circumstances to boot. Because its frustrating, and ESPECIALLY so in a survival game like this one.
Because the problem is that this game really sucks you in and it's a pain in the ass and/or nearly impossible to remember to drop what you're doing to go save your game, especially when this requires you to go find a sink to do so.
Imagine you're going out into the forest ready to cut down a ton of trees for the big base expansion you have planned. So you go out and spend the entire in game day cutting trees and collecting wood, killing badies as they come, as you do in any survival game. After a hard days work you head back home and hit a patch of sky that's caught on fire, or a batch of roaming enemies.. and ut oh, you just got killed and that whole day of work has to be done over.
Again, the game is done in a way that you can have a save spot semi-nearby most of the time once you fully grasp and experiment with the building and vehicle system, but there are still times you loose progress that will be frustrating because we're human beings and we're GOING to forget to save every 10-15 minutes.
The next issue was just the lack of direction/instruction through the story/lure and honestly some of the game mechanics too. I love that this is a very.... not hold your hand.... kind of game. but sometimes the direction that is given will make you facepalm. There is one stage of the story where you get a photograph of a house on a hill and the clue just says "Find the yellow house" No marker on the map, no other direction at all.... nothing. I got lucky myself and found the house almost right away. But I KNOW there are people that got to that point and gave up trying to find this house.
The same goes for a few game mechanics. Since you are left to your own devices for the entire game, there will be a period early on where you have no idea there are certain game mechanics at your disposal because you have no idea they exist. Which is also why I had a love/hate thing in the beginning. Once you grasp everything most of those early issues do have solutions to them that you just won't know about until you stumble on them.
Beyond the early stages this game is an absolute gem.
I'm sure people have come upon this games store page and scratched their heads when they realize the premise and gimmick of this survival game is.... peepee.
But don't let that initial reaction turn you away. The pee/infection mechanic is SO well done and is interlaced between multiple layers inside the game loop. I'm telling you, it's borerline genius. The fact that everything revolves around pee and isn't just a shock gimmick is quite the accomplishment. I don't want to go into great detail on this because half the fun is discovering all the wild aspects of how this concept is implemented, but I will say that there are so many different layers that in really drags you into the world and immerses you in what's going on around you.
This is also doubly so because the in game lore you discover can be pretty interesting. There are two main ways lure is put into Urge;
1. Through normal means like finding a few notes and just progressing to the next story stage and find tidbits along the way as you explore. This isn't a game packed with lure notes that could fill a novel, but the story it's telling, and just as importantly, NOT telling, really drags you into the concept in the hope you can fully discover what's going on.
2. Through the environment itself, if you really explore the world you can find some quite shocking revelations by scenes you can come across. Locations and incidents essentially frozen in time when everything went wrong. It's a really great way to tell just a bit of story while also bringing up many new questions as well.
All of this really drags you in and has a great level of world building that makes you want more. Which was also why it was frustrating at times too, because some of it is so open ended that you can get stuck and have no idea what to do next, even after searching high and low. Which I am right now, no idea what I'm supposed to find next.
The game is also packed with a surprisingly deep building system. This also led to me really caring about my base (and vehicles) because the dev clearly wanted a building system that offered a lot of freedom. This uses a pillar style system where you essentially spread poles everywhere like frames and then fill them in with doors, walls, etc. It's a very fluid and well designed system once you've experimented with it a while.
This is a wholly unique building system that has clearly been designed from the ground up because I have played ALOT and I mean ALOTTTTTT of building games and I have never seen a building system quite like this one. It's fun to play with, it's fun to experiment with, and the implementation could not be better.
That building system is doubly cool when you realize it also applies and works with vehicles you come across in the world. And let me tell you, that was a pleasant surprise. You see in the game trailer that there are vehicles and maybe they can have defenses or upgrades, but it doesn't do it justice. The modular pillar base building system also works with vehicles and I can't describe how much fun that has been. You can do some pretty wild things with cars, and it's even cooler that exploration can reward you with some really fun cars to use.
This leads to exploration. While I did find myself wishing there were more materials in the world overall, more crafting recipes, etc, I did still like going around hunting and looting locations, clearing areas out one at a time. Most locations have some kind of interesting and unique item you can find. If you went through a major point of interest and didn't walk away with a smile on your face because you just found a new toy, then it's because you missed it.
The combat and weapons are all fun, again don't want to dig too deep here for any spoilers on how some of the pee mechanics work, but everything works well. Even the enemy AI isn't half bad. Sometimes purposely leaning and trying to get out of your line of fire.
Crafting is also cool as it borrows the Resident Evil 4 idea where a lot of crafting comes from combining items. There are lots of combinations to discover, some of them you can find as lure, most of them from just experimenting with everything and seeing what can combine with what. It's well done, it's fun, I liked it!
So even though I had a rough time at the beginning, I am SO glad I stuck with it because once you figure it all out, this is one hell of a game
