Another game that I got a long time ago and never got around to play is Unturned by Smartly Dressed Games. Smartly Dressed Games solely has one Canadian Developer and that fact is made very evident. From locations you can choose to the characters you see it really excited me to see a game so heavily, and comedically, focused around Canada.
If you’re on the hunt for a zombie survival game with the feel of an advanced minecraft then this game is for you. Although the concept is rather simple there are a few things that I would suggest that you do when starting out.
To start off I would highly suggest going through the tutorial. I skipped it initially and struggled until I went back and did it. It was well laid out and did a wonderful job of explaining the basics. Once you got past those it even gave you the option to learn some more advanced stuff which helps out a lot as well.
Another thing that you might want to consider is playing solo on an offline map. Unless there’s people you’re hoping to play with, being online is just going to make it tougher. This is only compounded by the fact that every time you die you’re starting from scratch, until you make a bed roll at least. Even more frustrating is the fact that your upgraded skills decrease on death, meaning that you are just losing that progress you’ve made up to that point. (I keep trying to max out my agriculture level and keep dying bringing it down to zero. Probably not the best skill to start with but I was trying to make a garden!)
A little way to work around that is knowing that your unspent experience doesn’t disappear so holding off to “buy” your skill upgrades could save you a lot of frustration when you die. It will mean that you’re weaker than you could be at the time but it is a way to game the system. You can get around losing those skill points in the advanced settings menu and turning off that feature if you’re not opposed to doing that kind of thing while gaming.
I’m not really sold on this game as it is extremely frustrating while not giving that rewarding feeling of completing things. Creating structures and items required a lot of looking up online as the crafting screen is not user friendly. Don’t get me wrong, if you spent a lot of time in the game playing frequently you would likely become accustomed to it but i don’t play like that. Especially when there are some names for items that are just slightly different than what you would expect making it tough to find the item in the crafting menu.
Once you do have an established base the game gets a bit better. Being able to grow crops and store items in a consistent location makes recovery after death a lot easier. If you get a bed roll down too and have your set up in an area where zombies don’t tend to spawn you’ll be set.
A little trick that helps a lot in the beginning is if you’re going to die try and get as close to your bed roll as possible. Everything that you have on you when you die will be there but there for some reason it will also spawn a new set of clothes that you can break down into scraps that help create items like a torch that become helpful down the road.
Another thing that helps a lot is creating spikes. Knock down a tree and take the sticks to turn into spikes. Later on when you’re able to create a saw you can cut the logs down into planks and then stick, allowing you to create a lot of spikes from each tree. Using those spikes it is a lot easier to take out zombies and collect the items that they leave behind.
Between those two tricks you can get a lot of the raw materials to get a lot further into the game. Even so far as creating a farm to raise animals establishing a homestead. Possibly the closest some of us will ever get to that goal of having a property, even if you did have to take it from the zombies.
If you enjoy minecraft I would take a run at Unturned. Especially as a Canadian it was a lot of fun jumping into this game. The ridiculous descriptions and splattering of Canadian flags and mounties around the maps really made the game for me. If it was something that I was playing on the steam deck while on the couch watching T.V. it would be perfect. Dedicating specific time to the game though is not appealing to me and I don’t see myself continuing further into it.
