Survarium is a post apocalyptic Free to play FPS game, currently in steam early access. In its current state, Survarium offers three playable competitive gamemodes in a FPS style. With interesting map design, character progression and balanced pay to win methods, Survarium is proving to be a hit. The Survarium development team is also releasing an open world gamemode which just like Dayz, requires players to scavenge, loot and survive. This gamemode is currently in development, and not yet released. No release date has been issued.
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it died for a reason
Atrocious. Tedious. Unfun. Those are a few words that can describe this entire game in a nutshell.
This is a Multiplayer First Person Shooter that suffers from schizophrenia, as it doesn’t seem to understand what kind of game it wants to be. I haven’t seen a shooter game that has had an identity crisis this bad since Resident Evil 6. No disrespect to RE6 though, I fuckin’ love that game.
[ 𝘾𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙂𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙮 ]
Christ on a bike where do I even start with this? So it’s an FPS game set during an apocalypse, but the apocalypse setting has no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever and I’ll get into that. The game plays like your generic Call of Duty esque casual twitch shooter but it fails hard at trying to be just that. There are HUGE issues that actually makes this game just un-fucking-bearable to play. Lemme start with how gear works.
{ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙂𝙪𝙣𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙀𝙦𝙪𝙞𝙥𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 }
How guns work in this game is that they are divided by tiers. Every gun has a tier, and they go from 1-5. The higher the tier, the better the gun performs, things like less recoil, more damage, more range, etc. The difference between a level 1 weapon and a level 5 one is like night and day. You get higher tier guns by leveling up your faction and rank, but this shit takes fucking forever. It takes a ton of matches just to go up by one level. And even then, you still need to spend Silver to buy the gun, and this shit takes quite the grind to get as well.
Leveling up your armor will increase things like bullet defense, explosion resistance, and oxygen capacity. To do this you spend either Scrap or Gold. Scrap is earned from playing matches like with Silver but again, it’s on the grindy side. Also, to put attachments on your guns, you need to purchase them with Gold or Scrap as well. So you need Scrap for both armor upgrading AND for getting attachments. Or you could spend Gold. You wanna put a suppressor or a 2.5x ACOG scope on your gun? 500 Gold please. To get Gold you do either two things: spend real world money or you can turn a certain amount of Silver into Gold.
Now with what I just said you can most likely tell what I’m getting at from a mile away.
Of fucking course this game is Pay 2 Win. This is a Free-To-Play game so that’s obvious right? But this game just goes way too fucking far with this, it’s flat out egregious. Getting higher tier equipment and attachments is actually much easier if you just spend money on them. This game is insanely unforgiving to new players.
It’s a broken system, because if you’re a new player to this game you’re going to get fucking slaughtered, because most lobbies have players in them who already have max level gear, so you’re at a huge disadvantage already. It turns into Shoot First, Die First: The Video Game, because many times it doesn’t matter if you take the first shot, you’re most likely gonna die to your enemy because your gear is underleveled. Is this fucking Warframe PvP? It also doesn’t help that the matchmaking is just a big piss stain. Most of the time the max gear level, max level players get paired up against noobs with level 1 or 2 gear, it’s just plain unfair.
There are also preset kits that you can purchase with Gold. It’s a bundle that comes with a couple leveled up guns and armor, such as the Bandit Bundle and the Survivor Bundle. The game doesn’t even try to hide this shit. It’s like buying a preset class in a Call of Duty game.
There are also events that sell players exclusive weaponry like an AK12, a PP19 Bizon, and a PKP. And yes, these guns are max tier. They’re fully modded. And they’re expensive as fuck.
{ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙖𝙥𝙨 }
This is the main reason why I believe that this game just has an identity crisis. The maps in this game are so fucking shit that it’s giving me flashbacks to the maps from Modern Warfare 2019’s Multiplayer. The game has a max of 8v8 lobbies but the maps are WAY too complex in their size and verticality to only have this little amount of players in it. The maps are designed like the lobbies should be 16v16.
Not only are they large, but almost every building can be entered, and some of them have multiple floors. There are also many spots that are just empty space and serve no purpose. Every goddamn map in this game is like this. This is a huge problem because it makes the game flow SO much slower, because most of the match will be spent with you running around trying to find someone to shoot.
The game has that mechanic from COD and Battlefield where shooting a gun without a suppressor will make you pop up on the mini-map as a big red dot.
Almost every single match I’ve played ends before either team can even reach the score limit. And matches last up to 12 minutes. This game has a pretty quick TTK (Time To Kill), so do you play the game like it’s COD and just sprint everywhere, or do you take it slow and play it like a more tactical game like Squad, Rainbow Six Siege, or CSGO? Oh, and did I mention that this game has a stamina mechanic? Of course, make the game flow even slower than it already is.
The game wants to be a fast paced casual game like COD but the maps do not suit that type of playstyle, so in reality, you can’t play the game like it’s COD, and I’ll get into that. There’s another issue. There are no random spawns. Every respawn is always in one part of the map. It’s like how in Overwatch each team has a base where everyone always spawns at. The problem with this is that it also creates the issue of getting spawn killed repeatedly. The enemy is always gonna know where you are going to spawn, so they’re just gonna camp the spawns and wait for you to move. And that leads into my next biggest complaint
[ 𝘾𝙖𝙢𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙎𝙣𝙞𝙥𝙚𝙧 𝙎𝙥𝙖𝙢 ]
Do you hate getting sniped from across the map by a prone player in any of the Battlefield games? HOO BOY are you gonna fucking despise this game. I don’t think I'm exaggerating when I say that the game has hands down the worst camping and sniper spam I’ve ever seen in a game like this. The single shot sniper rifles are straight up overpowered. 90-95% percent of the time they will one shot kill you to the body. I’ve taken shots to the leg and still died in one shot. It doesn’t matter what rifle it is nor does it even matter that much what tier it is, the single shot sniper rifles can one shot body kill you and from ridiculous ranges almost every time. Hell, it doesn’t even matter if the enemy has a suppressor on the gun, most of the time you’re still gonna get one shotted. So it’s no wonder why there’s so fucking many of them.
And because of how large the maps are and how you can go inside every building, the maps and the sniper players go hand in hand. Most of the time you’re gonna get shot from out of nowhere. The enemies could be fucking anywhere. They could shoot at you from a window in a 2 or 3 story building, they could be crouched around a corner somewhere, they could be hiding in a bush, or they’re in their spawn hiding with a sniper rifle. It’s just a giant fucking campfest. I’ve seen less camping in Rainbow Six Siege, and that game is designed around tugging your sapi plated dick in a sweaty corner.
So because of the large maps, the low lobby numbers, the verticality of each map, the spawns, the stamina mechanic, and the fact that sniper rifles are fucking broken, it all creates a game where you are punished for moving. It’s the exact same shit that Modern Warfare suffers from. The flow of each match is all over the fucking place. It’s slower than a turd coming out of the ass of a fuckin’ sloth. Hell, even Semi Auto Sniper Rifles are really powerful because of low recoil and it only takes 2 body shots to kill someone. Everywhere I go I just get fucked.
Go left, I get sniped
Go right, I get sniped
Go middle, I get killed by a corner camper
I respawn, I get killed by a guy crouched in a corner next to my spawn point.
You see why this just sounds fucking excruciating?
It’s a game that is both Pay 2 Win, and the map design makes it extremely campy. And it doesn’t matter what game mode I play. Whether it’s Team Deathmatch, Slaughter, Search and Destroy, Domination, Capture the Flag, etc. The game is chock full of this unbalanced bullshit. Even a mode like Slaughter, where it’s supposed to be faster paced because the maps are smaller, is still shit because of the snipers, the camping, and the spawn system. Enemies are either camping on your side of the map, or they’re sitting nice and comfy on their side of their map waiting for you to approach them. Every killcam I watch is just some guy sitting ADS with a sniper rifle waiting for me to show up or they’re sitting ADS behind a headglitch with an assault rifle. Do I need to mention again these fucking people have tier 5 guns?
[ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 ]
This is a game that is supposed to be set during an apocalypse, and yet, the game manages to fuck that up. Because the setting has no bearing on how the game plays. It has no bearing on the fact that you can run around with a PPSH, an AKM, or a Mosin Nagant with 3-5 mags of ammunition, or a semi automatic shotgun with ONE HUNDRED reserve ammo. You can also find ammo boxes to refill all your ammo around the map, and they are shown to the player on their mini-map. The game is called Survarium and yet it does not play like a survival game, it just tries to imitate Call of Duty, so why the fuck is this game even set in the apocolypse? The apocalypse setting is just used as a cosmetic rather than a gameplay changer. If anything, the apocalyptic setting just makes the game more annoying to play.
Imagine just how cool how different this game could have been to other shooters if there was a survival aspect to it. Where there are very scarce resources, meaning you have to be very resourceful with your ammo and whatnot.
Kinda like how The Last of Us’s Multiplayer worked. Ammo and resources are scarce as fuck but you can craft more ammo with Parts which you get when you kill other players or find them and other resources in supply boxes scattered around the map. Not to mention armor had to be crafted with Parts as well and it can break after just a few shots. This creates a very tense cat and mouse type of game where every shot counts and you have to carefully use your items wisely, and it worked really well. It also worked because the maps weren’t that big and it was 4v4. This game could have done something like that, but no, it’s just a ripoff of COD, and a shitty one at that.
[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]
It seems like the developers just do not give a fuck about this game or never did. Either that or they have bitten off more than they could chew. There is a huge lack of transparency and communication when it comes to player feedback. The developers seem to be more worried about making money rather than actually fixing anything, by adding in more and more guns and other items that players are unwilling to pay for, instead of delivering what they promised.
As early as 2013 there was an open world aspect of the game that was promised but it never came, the next year it was promised but it never came again, and then the next year after that it never came, so on and so forth. The development of this game has just been way too slow. This game is now at least 7 years old and it still feels like a game in beta, like it’s unfinished. And as time went on they just decided to just keep adding more stupid shit into the game, because they just don’t have a clear vision of the project, nor passion for it. And this reflects in how they respond to criticism.
From what I’ve been reading on Steam and forums, the developers can’t seem to take it, as they tend to delete and ban Tweets and other posts made by people speaking out about the retarded choices they’ve been making with the game. Voice your concerns with the company even with good intention, and you get silenced. So good to know that these are the kind of people who shat out this fucking garbage pile out. To be honest, I’m not surprised. Current day Naughty Dog would get along with you guys very fucking well.
I wonder when, just fucking when, we reach a point in time where these companies start being held accountable for inherently breaking the law with violating Fair Use policy trying to shield themselves from valid criticism. But that's the mentality of game companies nowadays: Release a broken unfinished product, charge people ridiculous amounts for it, and when people call you out on it, you either ignore it or respond back with malicious intent.
I feel sorry for the people who were actually passionate about this pathetic excuse of a product. Why is this shit still even on Steam?? If anything it’s just a goddamn waste of precious hard drive space.
Fuck this company, fuck this game.
2/10
This is a Multiplayer First Person Shooter that suffers from schizophrenia, as it doesn’t seem to understand what kind of game it wants to be. I haven’t seen a shooter game that has had an identity crisis this bad since Resident Evil 6. No disrespect to RE6 though, I fuckin’ love that game.
[ 𝘾𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙂𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙮 ]
Christ on a bike where do I even start with this? So it’s an FPS game set during an apocalypse, but the apocalypse setting has no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever and I’ll get into that. The game plays like your generic Call of Duty esque casual twitch shooter but it fails hard at trying to be just that. There are HUGE issues that actually makes this game just un-fucking-bearable to play. Lemme start with how gear works.
{ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙂𝙪𝙣𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙀𝙦𝙪𝙞𝙥𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 }
How guns work in this game is that they are divided by tiers. Every gun has a tier, and they go from 1-5. The higher the tier, the better the gun performs, things like less recoil, more damage, more range, etc. The difference between a level 1 weapon and a level 5 one is like night and day. You get higher tier guns by leveling up your faction and rank, but this shit takes fucking forever. It takes a ton of matches just to go up by one level. And even then, you still need to spend Silver to buy the gun, and this shit takes quite the grind to get as well.
Leveling up your armor will increase things like bullet defense, explosion resistance, and oxygen capacity. To do this you spend either Scrap or Gold. Scrap is earned from playing matches like with Silver but again, it’s on the grindy side. Also, to put attachments on your guns, you need to purchase them with Gold or Scrap as well. So you need Scrap for both armor upgrading AND for getting attachments. Or you could spend Gold. You wanna put a suppressor or a 2.5x ACOG scope on your gun? 500 Gold please. To get Gold you do either two things: spend real world money or you can turn a certain amount of Silver into Gold.
Now with what I just said you can most likely tell what I’m getting at from a mile away.
Of fucking course this game is Pay 2 Win. This is a Free-To-Play game so that’s obvious right? But this game just goes way too fucking far with this, it’s flat out egregious. Getting higher tier equipment and attachments is actually much easier if you just spend money on them. This game is insanely unforgiving to new players.
It’s a broken system, because if you’re a new player to this game you’re going to get fucking slaughtered, because most lobbies have players in them who already have max level gear, so you’re at a huge disadvantage already. It turns into Shoot First, Die First: The Video Game, because many times it doesn’t matter if you take the first shot, you’re most likely gonna die to your enemy because your gear is underleveled. Is this fucking Warframe PvP? It also doesn’t help that the matchmaking is just a big piss stain. Most of the time the max gear level, max level players get paired up against noobs with level 1 or 2 gear, it’s just plain unfair.
There are also preset kits that you can purchase with Gold. It’s a bundle that comes with a couple leveled up guns and armor, such as the Bandit Bundle and the Survivor Bundle. The game doesn’t even try to hide this shit. It’s like buying a preset class in a Call of Duty game.
There are also events that sell players exclusive weaponry like an AK12, a PP19 Bizon, and a PKP. And yes, these guns are max tier. They’re fully modded. And they’re expensive as fuck.
{ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙖𝙥𝙨 }
This is the main reason why I believe that this game just has an identity crisis. The maps in this game are so fucking shit that it’s giving me flashbacks to the maps from Modern Warfare 2019’s Multiplayer. The game has a max of 8v8 lobbies but the maps are WAY too complex in their size and verticality to only have this little amount of players in it. The maps are designed like the lobbies should be 16v16.
Not only are they large, but almost every building can be entered, and some of them have multiple floors. There are also many spots that are just empty space and serve no purpose. Every goddamn map in this game is like this. This is a huge problem because it makes the game flow SO much slower, because most of the match will be spent with you running around trying to find someone to shoot.
The game has that mechanic from COD and Battlefield where shooting a gun without a suppressor will make you pop up on the mini-map as a big red dot.
Almost every single match I’ve played ends before either team can even reach the score limit. And matches last up to 12 minutes. This game has a pretty quick TTK (Time To Kill), so do you play the game like it’s COD and just sprint everywhere, or do you take it slow and play it like a more tactical game like Squad, Rainbow Six Siege, or CSGO? Oh, and did I mention that this game has a stamina mechanic? Of course, make the game flow even slower than it already is.
The game wants to be a fast paced casual game like COD but the maps do not suit that type of playstyle, so in reality, you can’t play the game like it’s COD, and I’ll get into that. There’s another issue. There are no random spawns. Every respawn is always in one part of the map. It’s like how in Overwatch each team has a base where everyone always spawns at. The problem with this is that it also creates the issue of getting spawn killed repeatedly. The enemy is always gonna know where you are going to spawn, so they’re just gonna camp the spawns and wait for you to move. And that leads into my next biggest complaint
[ 𝘾𝙖𝙢𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙎𝙣𝙞𝙥𝙚𝙧 𝙎𝙥𝙖𝙢 ]
Do you hate getting sniped from across the map by a prone player in any of the Battlefield games? HOO BOY are you gonna fucking despise this game. I don’t think I'm exaggerating when I say that the game has hands down the worst camping and sniper spam I’ve ever seen in a game like this. The single shot sniper rifles are straight up overpowered. 90-95% percent of the time they will one shot kill you to the body. I’ve taken shots to the leg and still died in one shot. It doesn’t matter what rifle it is nor does it even matter that much what tier it is, the single shot sniper rifles can one shot body kill you and from ridiculous ranges almost every time. Hell, it doesn’t even matter if the enemy has a suppressor on the gun, most of the time you’re still gonna get one shotted. So it’s no wonder why there’s so fucking many of them.
And because of how large the maps are and how you can go inside every building, the maps and the sniper players go hand in hand. Most of the time you’re gonna get shot from out of nowhere. The enemies could be fucking anywhere. They could shoot at you from a window in a 2 or 3 story building, they could be crouched around a corner somewhere, they could be hiding in a bush, or they’re in their spawn hiding with a sniper rifle. It’s just a giant fucking campfest. I’ve seen less camping in Rainbow Six Siege, and that game is designed around tugging your sapi plated dick in a sweaty corner.
So because of the large maps, the low lobby numbers, the verticality of each map, the spawns, the stamina mechanic, and the fact that sniper rifles are fucking broken, it all creates a game where you are punished for moving. It’s the exact same shit that Modern Warfare suffers from. The flow of each match is all over the fucking place. It’s slower than a turd coming out of the ass of a fuckin’ sloth. Hell, even Semi Auto Sniper Rifles are really powerful because of low recoil and it only takes 2 body shots to kill someone. Everywhere I go I just get fucked.
Go left, I get sniped
Go right, I get sniped
Go middle, I get killed by a corner camper
I respawn, I get killed by a guy crouched in a corner next to my spawn point.
You see why this just sounds fucking excruciating?
It’s a game that is both Pay 2 Win, and the map design makes it extremely campy. And it doesn’t matter what game mode I play. Whether it’s Team Deathmatch, Slaughter, Search and Destroy, Domination, Capture the Flag, etc. The game is chock full of this unbalanced bullshit. Even a mode like Slaughter, where it’s supposed to be faster paced because the maps are smaller, is still shit because of the snipers, the camping, and the spawn system. Enemies are either camping on your side of the map, or they’re sitting nice and comfy on their side of their map waiting for you to approach them. Every killcam I watch is just some guy sitting ADS with a sniper rifle waiting for me to show up or they’re sitting ADS behind a headglitch with an assault rifle. Do I need to mention again these fucking people have tier 5 guns?
[ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 ]
This is a game that is supposed to be set during an apocalypse, and yet, the game manages to fuck that up. Because the setting has no bearing on how the game plays. It has no bearing on the fact that you can run around with a PPSH, an AKM, or a Mosin Nagant with 3-5 mags of ammunition, or a semi automatic shotgun with ONE HUNDRED reserve ammo. You can also find ammo boxes to refill all your ammo around the map, and they are shown to the player on their mini-map. The game is called Survarium and yet it does not play like a survival game, it just tries to imitate Call of Duty, so why the fuck is this game even set in the apocolypse? The apocalypse setting is just used as a cosmetic rather than a gameplay changer. If anything, the apocalyptic setting just makes the game more annoying to play.
Imagine just how cool how different this game could have been to other shooters if there was a survival aspect to it. Where there are very scarce resources, meaning you have to be very resourceful with your ammo and whatnot.
Kinda like how The Last of Us’s Multiplayer worked. Ammo and resources are scarce as fuck but you can craft more ammo with Parts which you get when you kill other players or find them and other resources in supply boxes scattered around the map. Not to mention armor had to be crafted with Parts as well and it can break after just a few shots. This creates a very tense cat and mouse type of game where every shot counts and you have to carefully use your items wisely, and it worked really well. It also worked because the maps weren’t that big and it was 4v4. This game could have done something like that, but no, it’s just a ripoff of COD, and a shitty one at that.
[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]
It seems like the developers just do not give a fuck about this game or never did. Either that or they have bitten off more than they could chew. There is a huge lack of transparency and communication when it comes to player feedback. The developers seem to be more worried about making money rather than actually fixing anything, by adding in more and more guns and other items that players are unwilling to pay for, instead of delivering what they promised.
As early as 2013 there was an open world aspect of the game that was promised but it never came, the next year it was promised but it never came again, and then the next year after that it never came, so on and so forth. The development of this game has just been way too slow. This game is now at least 7 years old and it still feels like a game in beta, like it’s unfinished. And as time went on they just decided to just keep adding more stupid shit into the game, because they just don’t have a clear vision of the project, nor passion for it. And this reflects in how they respond to criticism.
From what I’ve been reading on Steam and forums, the developers can’t seem to take it, as they tend to delete and ban Tweets and other posts made by people speaking out about the retarded choices they’ve been making with the game. Voice your concerns with the company even with good intention, and you get silenced. So good to know that these are the kind of people who shat out this fucking garbage pile out. To be honest, I’m not surprised. Current day Naughty Dog would get along with you guys very fucking well.
I wonder when, just fucking when, we reach a point in time where these companies start being held accountable for inherently breaking the law with violating Fair Use policy trying to shield themselves from valid criticism. But that's the mentality of game companies nowadays: Release a broken unfinished product, charge people ridiculous amounts for it, and when people call you out on it, you either ignore it or respond back with malicious intent.
I feel sorry for the people who were actually passionate about this pathetic excuse of a product. Why is this shit still even on Steam?? If anything it’s just a goddamn waste of precious hard drive space.
Fuck this company, fuck this game.
2/10