Platform: PC

Developer: Nelton Sexton

Publisher: Smartly Dressed Games

Release Date: July 7, 2014 (Early Access)

Genre: Survival Horror

Nerd Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed by Darth Omix

What would you get if you crammed a DayZ-type experience into an almost Minecraft-esque art style? That’s pretty much what Unturned is. Free-to-play on Steam, with a few – mostly cosmetic – additions if you shell out $5 to the developer. Though I like supporting indie developers, I’ve allotted my funds to other games, so unfortunately I won’t be expressing the “full” Unturned experience. However, as I said, most of the additions are pretty much cosmetic options for character creation.

Said character creation isn’t too in-depth, but the art style of the game makes it not really necessary, and besides, who really cares what face you gave your guy when you’re sniping zombies at sixty yards in a chef’s hat, plaid shirt, and no pants?

Thankfully, the good old “Step, Punch, Step” strategy works well, if you don’t wait too long between steps.

There are a number of skills you can use the experience you get from killing zombies (or other players) for, from taking less and dealing more melee damage to having a smaller aggro radius.

The one glaring issue I had playing Unturned is a similar problem to what I had with Minecraft, that my laptop doesn’t seem to like clicking while holding down WASD or an Arrow Key. However, rebinding my attack buttons to something else fixed that issue, and I was able to live more than twenty seconds after encountering a zombie.

Unlike other zombie survival games I’ve seen, the zombies in Unturned won’t simply give up. I ended up having a pack of zombies chase me into the ocean. Thankfully the undead jerks can’t swim, so there were around 7 or so of them in a big mass on a pier.

It can get to such levels of absurdity it becomes quite hilarious.

You have five “stats” outside of your skills to keep track of: Health, Hunger, Thirst, Radiation, and Energy. Energy is used for sprinting and jumping, the latter of which being a big problem if you don’t keep track of it in a getaway, and the others are pretty self-explanatory.

The game has crafting and more advanced elements, but I honestly died far too much to make any use of them. That isn’t a bad thing though, because I enjoyed the game enough to jump back in and try to locate where I died, namely because everything you have drops in a pile on death and will stay there even when you respawn. It doesn’t really help if you die out in the middle of nowhere.

Unturned features multiplayer servers akin to DayZ, however you can indeed opt for a single player experience if you, like myself, are so grossly paranoid that you would shoot anyone as soon as they were beyond melee range. I don’t normally play games like this because of that reason, however, I found myself enjoying Unturned very much, even if I got a police car stuck on a stop sign.

When I get a car on a stop sign, I get a car on a stop sign.

All-in-all I enjoyed Unturned. The art style is quirky and entertaining, the gameplay is enjoyable and responsive if your touchpad isn’t evil, and I found myself excited by every small win. However, there are some issues, as very few games are perfect. When loading up a firearm it is fairly difficult to tell just what ammo works with what guns. Personally, I’d like it if in the item description for ammunition it maybe said what kinds of guns the ammo would work with. Instead, I just discarded half the bullets I found and used the ammo variants the guns came pre-loaded with. A similar issue came with weapon modifications, though this wasn’t so much what did and didn’t work as it was something I knew worked but took some finagling of clicks and Enter presses to actually have the thing attach. Most of these can still be attributed to the game being in Early Access, so minor issues are to be expected.

As I said, overall I enjoyed Unturned and would readily recommend it to anyone interested in a fun, free, DayZ-like experience in a more simple and less gritty art style.

For once it’s berries, not mushrooms, that make you trip out.