Long before Bethesda took the reins of the series and Walton Goggins smeared on the ghoul make-up for his spellbinding turn in its adapted TV show, Fallout was an isometric action RPG viewed from a bird’s eye perspective. It's that classic style of wasteland-wandering that the upcoming Survive the Fall appears to be using as its reference point, at least if the first few hours of the game I got my hands on are anything to go by. This deadly post-apocalyptic tale of survival builds on the original Fallout's template – quite literally in the case of its robust camp development system – and its squad-based combat and scavenging help it craft an experience that feels fresh, even if the somewhat static story presentation prevents its personality from totally shining through.
Unlike so many other post-apocalypses, Survive the Fall's ruined world wasn't caused by man's own nuclear negligence. Instead, it seems that humanity got a dose of the sort of disaster that made the dinosaurs drop dead, when a comet collided with the earth and wiped out a significant slice of the world's population. It also left a smoldering crater that leaks a toxic mist called Stasis, and those who survived either avoid it like the interplanetary plague it is or embrace it, absorbing its otherworldly power to mutate into stronger forms at the expense of their own humanity. Throughout Survive the Fall, your growing squad of scavengers must build bonds with the various factions found scattered around its three biomes in order to survive and thrive, from the Stasis-huffing Shroomers to the mysterious cult known only as the Sighted.As I undertook each new task from Survive the Fall's countless quest-givers, I took an instant liking to its squad-based setup. As you steer your party of up to three survivors around the sprawling national park area that serves as the setting for the beginning of the story, you can either manually search through abandoned chests for chemical compounds or chop down trees for lumber, or you can just tap a button to delegate the gruntwork to one of your cohorts, allowing you to divert your attention elsewhere. It feels more natural to divide each task up rather than forcing you to be hands-on with everything yourself while your AI companions stand around like bored children, and it speeds up the process of ransacking each settlement you come across. The only downside is that my view did become a little cluttered with button prompts anytime there were a number of interactive elements bunched together too closely in the environment, but thankfully those occasions were rare.
Combat is also team-based. I tended to approach each encounter with the various marauders and ghouls with stealth as my priority, given that rifle and shotgun ammunition seemed so scarce at least in this early part of Survive the Fall's story. Thus, I treated each infiltration of an enemy camp not unlike a careful stalk through the recent Commandos: Origins – hiding in long grass, throwing stones to create distractions, crouch-walking around the clearly marked enemy vision cones, and finally slitting their throats before ordering one of my post-apocalyptic pals to hide the body for me. There are also some satisfying environmental hazards to take advantage of, from obligatory explosive barrels to dangling cargo pallets that can be dropped onto a patrolling guard with a well-timed rifle shot.
Survive the Fall - Preview Screens
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It felt good to carefully clear out each cluster of cultists, but during the instances that my cover was blown, things did get a little bit fiddly once the firearms were drawn. I suspect there would have been a bit more precision offered with mouse and keyboard, but with a controller, I found it overly fussy to get a bead on an enemy's head using the lasersight, and more often than not resorted to hammering the melee attack and dodge move to chip away at their health bars in close quarters. Thankfully, I was at least able to make good use of the ability to pause the action and direct my squadmates to focus on certain targets – reminiscent of similar systems in Wasteland or Mutant Year Zero – relying on them to wear down the beefier cult leaders while I mopped up the flamethrower-toting support crew.
After a hard day's mutant-murdering and loot-harvesting out in its deadly badlands, Survive the Fall shifts gears into a base-building management sim back at your camp. Documents recovered out in the world can be researched in order to earn knowledge points, which can then be invested in a sizable technology tree to unlock the ability to craft everything from bunk beds and kitchen areas to water filtration systems or even an armoury. Resources like timber can be crafted into planks which are then assembled into frames for new structures like plant boxes or gates to block nighttime raiders, while foraged herbs or meat salvaged from wolves and deer can be prepared into meals and stuffed into the backpacks of whichever group of adventurers you choose to send out on your next expedition. There seems to be quite a lot of depth here, and I can definitely see myself spending a considerable amount of time transforming my settlement from rusty rubble to a cozy bubble in the finished game.
Outside of my own base, I found a number of intriguing areas to explore. From a crashed passenger plane that had been converted into an enemy fort to a farmstead that was crawling with Stasis-infected ghouls, Survive the Fall seemed to reward me with distinct locales in any direction I pointed my compass in. The impressive level of detail in some of these areas was also to its detriment, however, such as the swamplands of Mycorrhiza which dazzled with luminescent mushroom clusters but also dragged with a framerate that was more volatile than any of the toxic substances oozing from the earth. It was also plagued by the occasional game-breaking bug, and on a handful of occasions during my play session, I was forced to quit and reload my save after getting stuck in an inventory screen or building menu. Thankfully, there's still another month or so before Survive the Fall's release for developer Angry Bulls Studio to optimize the performance further.
Survive the Fall seemed to reward me with distinct locales in any direction I pointed my compass in. "That's probably not quite enough time to draft in actors to record lines of dialogue, though, and that's a slight shame because interacting with your squad or the various NPCs you meet along the way feels a little flat when it's done exclusively via onscreen text. Although I did get a few laughs out of the odd character here and there – particularly from a quirky character named Blooper who referred to the Stasis smog as 'fart wind' – much of my conversations just served to cue up the next fetch quest rather than really give me any lasting impressions of each faction member I met.
Perhaps the bonds will deepen over the course of the full journey, and we won't have to wait long to find out. Survive the Fall is due for release on PC this May and it's full of post-apocalyptic potential. Assuming that the existing rough edges found on its controls and performance can be polished up by then, this could well be a survival-based action RPG worthy of your hard-earned bottlecaps.
