How to Survive

I'll be upfront: How to Survive is not scratching the same itch as a deep RPG, and if you walk in hoping for meaningful decisions or a branching narrative, you will be disappointed before the first island is cleared. What it actually is, underneath that Action-RPG label, is a lighthearted twin-stick zombie brawler with a crafting backbone and just enough survival-sim wrapping to keep things interesting for a weekend. Think Dead Island compressed into a six-hour isometric package that doesn't take itself seriously, and you're roughly in the right headspace. You pick one of three survivors - Kenji the balanced all-rounder, Abby the fast athlete, or Jack the hard-hitting brawler - each carrying a distinct stat spread and a personal skill tree. The trees are shallow by any honest RPG standard; a handful of nodes covering things like campfire lighting, extended hunger and thirst timers, and arrow-crafting perks that become dead weight the moment you assemble a handmade gun. Still, the progression loop from scavenging a stick off the ground to cobbling together a firearm from five scattered components has genuine forward momentum. Crafting recipes don't announce themselves - you scavenge blueprints left by the game's standout character, Kovac, a gravel-voiced survivalist who stomps around in full armor and serves as both tutorial guide and the closest thing the story has to a compelling personality. Kovac is genuinely fun to listen to. Everyone else in the cast is forgettable at best and awkwardly voiced at worst. The survival meters - hunger, thirst, sleep - add texture without adding real pressure. Food and water are plentiful enough that you rarely feel the squeeze unless you're pushing into a late-island combat spike unprepared. Sleep is the one mechanic with actual teeth: you can only rest in reinforced shelters, and clearing those shelters against dense zombie clusters is a genuine challenge solo. Bring a local or online co-op partner and the whole experience jumps a tier; challenge mode in particular, where you're dropped on a random island and must fight to an escape plane under brutal modifiers including an "Iron Man" setting, is the best the game has to offer and pairs well with a friend. The enemy variety covers armored regulars, explosive fat zombies, photophobic night-crawlers that punish torch mismanagement, and infected wildlife including piranha-filled swamps that will casually solve your crowd-control problems if you're paying attention. The honest problems: the campaign is short and repetitive, wrapping up right when the crafting system finally opens up. The skill trees lack depth, difficulty balance wobbles badly between islands, and the static map means zero organic discovery after your first run. Metacritic landed this at 60, and that's about right - it's a game that reviewers called "too many ideas without nearly enough follow through," and the shoe fits. The writing earns no second read. There are no choices that ripple forward. As an RPG it is barely RPG-adjacent. As a breezy co-op zombie romp with satisfying melee crunch and a crafting loop that holds up for exactly as long as the campaign demands, it does what it sets out to do.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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