Contest Entry: Unturned (by Bacxaber)

Unturned is a zombie survival game where the player must aquire food/water, armour, weapons and supplies to craft things. The game was immediately appealing to me, given that it reminded me of the Blockhead series in terms of style. I was quite upset to learn about the food/water meters, as I find myself unable to enjoy my time playing such games whilst I have those problems constantly looming over my head. That said, I see why it’s there. There wouldn’t be much point to the game otherwise.

You start off completely naked (literally, you don’t have pants) and you can explore the extremely large map from there. There are several towns in each map, each having different things. There are vehicles to safely traverse the roads, but they require (and eat up A LOT of) gas. While gas stations aren’t that hard to find, gas cans are.

As I said before, the graphics remind me of the Blockhead flash games. At first glance, it may remind you of Roblox or Minecraft, but the characters have rounded shoulders, pivot at the waist, and besides their heads (and therefore, most hats), nothing is made out of cubes. While I can’t run it on highest settings, it still looks quite nice on medium/low. I only ran into one graphical error, and it was extremely minimal.

The combat is…meh. Melee is great, but I don’t recommend using guns. Firstly, the supplies are randomly generated across the world, so finding a gun isn’t enough. You also need to find ammo, which can be REALLY hard to do. Secondly, the game doesn’t just let you reload, no, there’s this complex load-reload system that I still don’t fully understand. According to other players, you can find a lot of ammo in army bases, but I found next to nothing. I’m not sure if the place was just looted or if I just suck.

The community is subpar. While it’s better than Rust or DayZ’s community, there are still those assholes who will shoot on sight and loot your bloody corpse. The other half of people try to roleplay, but this means they all just ignore you since you’re not part of their pure ultra XX MLG guild which is SUPER CEREAL, GUYS!! It’s great to play with friends if they can get into it, though.

Killing zombies gives you xp which you can spend on leveling up your skills, such as melee proficiency (which doesn’t seem to make ANY difference in my experience), gun skill, stamina, etc. In fact, none of them seem to make much of a difference at all. Maybe they’ll update it and make it more important later on, I don’t know.

There are other things you can do in the game, such as fishing for food or cutting down trees for wood. Again, crafting is a thing and they expect you to use it, but I personally don’t. I don’t have time to fletch arrows when I’m starving and 50 miles away from the nearest bakery.

Overall, Unturned is a good game with a bad community and a few design flaws. I’d still highly recommend it with a shiny 7.5/10.