Survive The Fall – An Interesting But Flawed Post-Apocalyptic RPG

Overview

The Apocalypse Never Looked So 2009

It’s fundamentally wrong to expect a AAA visual level, with all the shiny “RTX ON” memes and advanced effects, from an Indie game. In a day and age where visuals have surpassed substance in a lot of titles, it’s a wise decision to give more importance to the latter than the former. Be that as it may, we are indeed in 2025, and that has some relevance, too. If a game has a unique art direction that exudes panache and creativity, then it doesn’t matter how pixelated or dated it looks: it compensates for the lack of eye candy with style. That isn’t the case with Survive The Fall. Unfortunately, the post-apocalyptic setting, mostly focused on the ecological disaster theme than anything else, doesn’t look great and feels generic. You’ll wander through forests and ruined cityscapes, but rarely, if ever, will you be amazed or captivated by the scenery.

The lack of attention to detail and the general barrenness of locales and areas you’ll traverse isn’t necessarily fitting for an apocalypse, given that in the genre, there are many other instances of titles that do a much better job in conveying the atmosphere and desolation of this setting, without forsaking the fine bits that bring level design and worldbuilding to the next level. Graphically and artistically, Survive The Fall never manages to impress or stand out for its uniqueness; it’s a rather bland, uninspired adventure through a very forgettable world, that will feel like something already seen to anyone that played even a few post-apocalyptic themed games before this one. Sure, you could compensate for that with advanced visual effects and the most modern graphical tech, but this game doesn’t even do that; in fact, games that released a decade ago have the same or better visual fidelity and graphics than Survive The Fall. To name one: Wasteland 2, which I definitely recommend by the way.

Immersion-wise, the soundtrack and sound effects do the job, but aren’t anything special either. The lack of voice acting is understandable for an Indie budget production; however, it only feels like another nail in the coffin of shallow immersion already provided by all the other factors combined. Enemies hilariously fall down like wet rags after dying, animations are clunky, and the feedback on hits and shots is barely noticeable; it won’t give you much satisfaction. The particles and effects, like explosions or Molotov cocktails, look primitive and barebones. In all that, somehow, the game even manages to have inexplicably poor performance in select areas or more crowded situations, on a system far higher than its recommended requirements; a sign of negligible or nonexistent engine optimization, quite common with Unreal titles that aren’t finely tuned by their developers.

A Slow Crawl Through a Ruined World

In Survive The Fall, you’ll venture through multiple large semi-open world maps that range from countryside areas like forests to urban centers, most of the time on foot. You’ll be free to venture anywhere your current tools and capabilities allow you to reach; however, some areas will require specialized gear or completing quests to become fully accessible, such as those poisoned by the anomalous plant growths. During your travels you’ll find a great amount of resources, in many cases barred by obstacles such as debris that needs to be removed with appropriate tools, chests and caches that will be fundamental in your struggle for survival. On paper and initially, exploring these large maps feels interesting, since you’ll never know what to expect around the corners, travelling through a world so much changed by the apocalypse that at times it feels completely alien and unpredictable. Sounds good so far, right? Well, it’s not, in practical terms at least.

This game has a heavy focus on realism and survival mechanics: all of your party members, be they staying at your camp or traveling with you in sorties, will have bodily needs such as thirst, hunger and sleep, other than their health level and eventual harmful status effects. That’s completely fine as a premise, however, in Survive The Fall’s case, it soon becomes a hindrance rather than a factor that improves immersion and gameplay depth. In addition, even on the easier settings, which I tested for a bit, the inventory space available to each of your party members is extremely limited when compared to the sheer amount of resources you’ll find lying around. Picking said resources up involves manually pressing a key and ordering either your main character or another one to collect them, a few at a time at best, when some of them require even half a minute to harvest. Once you’re full, you’ll need to go back to your camp to deposit them, without any fast travel: it’s walking all the way back, which isn’t that bad considering that the maps aren’t enormous, but also becomes a problem while at camp. Your base has a limited storage space for all resources, and you’ll often have all but the rarest ones far in excess, meaning that if you’re full and there’s no more space available, you’ll not be able to deposit said resources anymore, further cluttering your characters.

To emphasize how bad this actually plays out, you’ll explore and loot resources for about 10-15 minutes before being already jam-packed and having to return to camp again. This is a constant loop, over and over, and it only gets worse with further areas that have more, and in many cases, more time-consuming resources to harvest. Not even in pure survival games, such as The Forest, for example, or 7 Days to Die, have I ever seen my inventory being so full so often. You can expand the capacity of inventories by crafting better backpacks, sure, but that isn’t an improvement good enough to solve this issue. Backtracking all the time isn’t fun, especially when doing so only worsens the survival needs of your crew on a constant basis. On top of all that, certain debris or resources may only be broken or collected with specialized tools, e.g. pickaxes for rocks, axes for wood and so forth, but your crewmates can only bring one of them each: result? You might find some juicy loot cache you can’t access because you don’t have the right tool to get rid of a few tree stumps or rock piles, and have to, once again, backtrack to camp to equip that tool and go back again. It’s a slog after 30 or 40 times, trust me on that.

The map is already outlined; however, points of interest and NPCs will be obscured until they come into your view range, using a basic fog of war system often seen in this genre. The addition of custom markers is a good choice, and allows players to mark resources and other points of interest easily and efficiently; it would be even better if there wasn’t a limit on how many of them you can place though, which I can’t fathom the reason for. I’m not one hundred percent sure whether or not all enemies respawn: I had some encounters in areas I previously cleared, but that may very well be because of larger story or quest events coming into play, rather than day-by-day straight respawn. Generally, once you clear an area of enemies and get whatever loot they were guarding, you have no reason to go back there a second time anyway.

Of Endless Kiting & Burial Speedrun Contests

Survive The Fall uses a real-time with pause combat system that allows issuing orders to your teammates and then executing them all at the same time once you unpause. It’s not mandatory to constantly do so, but for bigger fights or against higher-level enemies, it’s a very helpful feature that allows coordinating attacks, defense, healing and kiting tactics quite well. Other than melee options, using tools or actual weapons to kill your foes, you’ll also have a plethora of firearms, from pistols to sniper rifles and grenades, at your disposal: some crafted at your base, some found in the world or from dead enemies. In this apocalypse, firearms and ranged weapons in general aren’t that uncommon, nor is the ammo that powers them; in fact, you’ll find a substantial amount of ammunition and supplies to always be locked and loaded throughout the adventure. Overusing a weapon will degrade its durability, eventually making it unusable and in need of repair, something done mostly at camp: another reason for an additional trip back and forth, as if there weren’t enough already.

On the higher difficulties, enemies deal high damage, although you can avoid that by timing dodges well, making you able to even dodge bullets and arrows once you get the hang of the timing. The weaker component between the two styles of combat is definitely the melee: engaging a foe in hand-to-hand is little more than a shallow trade of messy, clunky blows that have little weight behind them, and look quite ridiculous at times, at least visually. Seeing people, mutants or animals hack each other in a Looney Toons kind of way, with terrible impact sound effects and dying screams, isn’t very enjoyable, let alone immersive. Fights based on melee weapons usually devolve into messy melee brawls where everyone hacks at anyone else, and whoever has the best DPS or armor, or sheer hit points in the case of some “elite” enemies, wins the battle.

Ranged combat isn’t much more exciting either. Most enemies, as well as you, will have to stop and point aim in order to hit something; usually that comes with some telegraphing involved so that you can make use of the dodge mechanic, which by the way isn’t easy to pull off against bullets, as it should be, but it’s entirely possible. The main issue of ranged combat is how limp everything feels. Shooting someone point-blank with a shotgun won’t make them fly backwards ten feet and mash them into a pile of minced meat as it should, no. Instead, there’s barely any feedback on hits, without much stagger or impact actually affecting anyone most of the time. The environmental hazards conveniently placed in most major battle areas, like barrels, deal a lot of damage, and you might see enemies thrown away a few meters after a gasoline barrel blows up in their face, but that’s about it: they won’t even get mutilated or burned up. Much realism, eh? One of the cheesiest mechanics that kind of ruins the whole combat is the kiting: basically you’ll be able to circle run to make enemies follow the first person that aggros them, while your companions shoot them, and then simply use the pause mode to switch the party member who does that while the others shoot again. With some practice, it does become quite easy to kite enemies that don’t have effective ranged options around, making a lot of fights more trivial than they should be. With the amount of healing you can craft and find around, wounds become a non-issue pretty soon as well, so there’s no management in that sense in any meaningful way.

Another way to approach fights is stealth. If you specialize your characters through leveling up their abilities enough, they can become master assassins in no time. The stealth system of Survive The Fall uses a basic viecone system with two areas, one that will compel enemies to search an area, and another that will immediately alert them if one of your guys gets in. Sound is apparently of no consequence in this system. You’ll be able to sneak up behind enemies and backstab them for an instant kill, but only if your skill is high enough, since the higher the enemy’s tier, the higher the requirement to silently assassinate them; especially earlier on, it won’t be possible to do this on all foes. It’s a very effective system, perhaps too much so: with some practice and strategy, it is entirely possible to clear out entire outposts without getting discovered, saving ammo and resources in the process as well. Bodies getting spotted will cause enemies to search a large area, but that’s almost never an issue since your party members can apparently bury a person in the ground in about five seconds or so, the resulting pile of rummaged dirt being totally not suspicious to anyone. It’s hilarious when an enemy just a few metres in front of you fails to notice that their mate just got killed and buried in front of them, just outside of their stealth detection area, always clearly shown up on your HUD. Yes, stealth is way too easy and way too cheesy, has very few cons at all and is straight down the best approach to get rid of enemies hassle-free. You won’t even need to do complex multi-character coordination to lure enemies or stab them in sync most of the time; that’s rarely ever needed at all. Plus, your companions often do get stuck with their pathfinding or in questionable terrain collisions, so it’s better to just go solo at it.

Tamagotchi: End of Civilization Special Edition

Camp management is a substantial component of the gameplay. I’d even say it’s the majority of it. As mentioned before, you’ll have to go back to camp pretty often to repair your stuff, deposit resources and make sure your characters don’t become excessively withered. Your customizable camp will have a series of facilities you can arrange as you prefer, but their layout won’t matter much in practice. Workshops, greenhouses, bunkhouses, forges: you name it, there probably is one, and you’ll get more the more research items you bring back to study, and rediscover lost technologies from before the apocalypse came. It’s a system similar to XCOM in a sense, where you split your time between managing your base and its research, and on the field leading your units. Remember how XCOm did this very well, in a dynamic and exciting way? Well, now think the complete opposite and you’ll have Survive The Fall.

As a concept and mechanically, it’s not inherently bad; what makes it really awful, however, is the sheer time camp management saps out of you. You’ll constantly have to micromanage crafting stations and characters, assigning individual ones to make one item or the other all the time, without the possibility of setting up queues and very limited automatic functions, such as auto-eat being one of them. You won’t simply assign people and immediately see them do whatever; you’ll have to watch these toons walk around in real time, go to that station, start the assignment, finish it, and deposit whatever in the depot every single time. Given that you’ll need to research, craft, build and sort out a lot of stuff, this soon becomes a tremendously boring endeavor. The quality of life in managing your camp is limited, with some obnoxious design choices, such as only one character being able to sleep on the ground at a time, despite there being hundreds of yards of free land around you. The time speedup function is a band-aid fix to a much bigger problem, which can be translated into: nobody wants to see little lemmings walking around for twenty minutes straight, and their little bars slowly filling up, in order to be able to go out and explore or fight again. The developers claim that the game is over 100 hours of content, but I’ll correct the statement: 100 hours of bloating and backtracking. It was so boring and slow that at some point I pulled up “Dr. House” on my second screen and rewatched some of the series again; probably the only thing that kept me sane through this absolute slog.

Looking for more RPGs? You may also enjoy these reviews:
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector – A Journey Of Freedom Across Desolate Stars – Colony Ship – Uncompromising Old-School Roleplaying on a Derelict, Dystopian Generational Spaceship! – Keplerth – Sci-fi Action Roleplaying on a Post-Apocalyptic, Distant Planet!

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