Survival games have been all the rave the last few years and we have seen just about every flavor imaginable. We have also seen numerous construction games being developed to provide a virtual sandbox for everyone to play in. What we haven’t seen too many of is a marriage of these two types of games and put into the same package.
Digital Homicide is doing just that in their development of Forsaken Uprising. Currently available on Steam, Forsaken Uprising is a first person survival game set in a medieval setting. You are dropped into the world with just a club and you have to survive while gathering, crafting and eventually building yourself a castle to protect your resources. There are towns you can raid, monsters to defeat and take their loot. But you need to be careful while roaming around because there are more dangerous things in the world to worry about, like your neighbor. That’s right, this is also a full PVP game where getting your castle sacked is a real concern.
The state of the game is what I would call an early alpha. The environment and aesthetics are very common with other games built on the Unity Engine. There is strong similarity to Rust, another survival game that came out last year. With Forsaken being set in a non-magic based medieval setting, you will quickly see unique modeling in the weapons, armor and structures.
While the combat is aiming to be paced like a FPS Shooter, I find it rather lackluster at the moment, being basically a Tank and Spank type situation without the ability to effectively dodge or block. Standing toe to toe with your adversary and seeing who runs out of health first is pretty much all there is to it.
You can make a variety of weapons starting with a stone axe and bow, eventually working your way to Swords, Claymores and Battle Axes. Ready to siege a castle, build a catapult and ammo and start knocking holes in their walls. This is an expensive operation in resources however, so be sure the plunder will be worth expenditure. You can also make various tiers of armor from cloth to leather, chain, and plate. However they take a very long time to make, so expect to be gearless for a while.
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The Vital Stat management system is rather interesting and works fairly well though. Run out of Stamina to perform actions, you start to deplete your strength. Deplete your strength and your health depletes. Deplete your health and you will die. I find it absolutely hilarious that you can kill yourself by performing too many actions. Run to far and you will drop dead, not paying attention to how much stamina is needed to build your castle? Dead. Of course this is on top of the need to not starve to death or get eaten by wild animals.
The crafting system is fairly deep using a multi-tiered progression system. Needing to gather resources, process the resources and then combine them into finished products utilizing various crafting stations adds a level of realism to your survival adventure. Components for recipes make sense, which is refreshing. So if you want to make a Stone Axe you will need harvest some wood and stone. To cook meat, take the meat you got from animals and place it with wood in a campfire. Unfortunately the user interface for crafting is poorly organized at the moment making it difficult to find what you can craft until you get use to it.
One major issue I see currently is that every time you die you have to start completely over unless you have a bedroll or a bed to respawn at. Since it takes quite a bit a farming for cloth to be able to make your first bedroll, I can see many people never experiencing the Castle Building aspects of the game. Providing the first bedroll would go a long ways to helping new players not feeling frustrated and quitting before they start. Even if you do lose all your stuff on death (which you do), spawning and having the ability to find your body, hopefully before someone else does, and regaining your items needs to be possible.
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I can see the potential in Forsaken Uprising, but for now it seems too rough to be truly enjoyable. Frequent system crashes make it difficult to progress and the empty servers make looking at the PVP systems and castle siege impractical at this time. This is one to come back to once a few more features are implemented. The three major systems, survival, crafting and PVP feel too disjointed for now. Though I am very interested in how they implement social systems like ranks and army management. Not to mention an actual economy that requires some sort of trade to maintain your castles. Until then, I will be placing this one on the back burner and watching while I wait.
