So, I’ve taken some time out of my busy schedule to take a look at a game that makes a small splash in the growing pool of survival games. What makes this game any different from something like DayZ or H1Z1? Well, mainly the lack of zombies and the odd sci-fi elements that are thrown about.
Grav is a game that was just launched in Early Access on January 8th, and it’s only been in development for about 5 months so far. On one hand, it’s impressive what they’ve managed to cobble together in such a short time, but on the other it’s easy for the game to slip up and let you know how short the development time has been.
When you spawn into the game for the first time, you’ll notice you have nothing more than a knife and a multi-tool. These are the two items that you will use to carve your way into the world. Worlds are server based, so if you start a character on one server, don’t expect to be able to hop onto another and have everything just waiting for you.
In the game’s current state, survival isn’t really that big of a deal, and you soon find that the game is more like Minecraft meets Starbound. Enemies populate the world, but you don’t need to immediately build a base to defend yourself from them, and death isn’t permanent. The first thing you’ll want to do is just start harvesting things.
Unlike the two games mentioned previously, you can’t terraform any of the landscape though resources, and the world itself, is procedurally generated. New resources like forests and ore will pop up as you play the game, but the landscape remains recognizable.
It’s a bit weird logging off in the middle of a field only to wake up and find yourself standing in a small forest, but hey, these things happen.
Resources are collected with your multi-tool, and as the name suggests, you can gather wood, ore, gems, and fossils with just the one tool. Once you’ve got a sufficient amount of wood, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the build menu to start building a base.
Where you build a base is totally up to you, but your buildings are destructible, so it’s not a great idea to place them right in the middle of enemy spawn zones. Right now there aren’t a lot of rooms, but each piece snaps together like lego pieces and players have already begun creating some impressive looking hangouts.
Crafting takes place at different kiosks. The factory kiosk, for instance, turns your raw resources into material you can actually use to create something like armor from your armory. There are a few kiosks you can build right now such as: the science kiosk, armory, farm, and factory. You can level these, up but there isn’t really much use for that now.
The game also features instanced dungeons that are, so far, soloable. There are unique mobs that are larger variants of the few enemy types in the game, and these usually drop a couple of blueprints when you down them.
Blueprints are the bread and butter of the game, and you’ll spend a large amount of time farming mobs for these. They’ll unlock things like force field doors, giant force fields for your base, guns, armor, turrets, vehicles, and a lot of other cool items. The biggest downside is that, similar to Diablo 2, you can grind your way through a dungeon countless times and still come up empty handed.
Combat is fairly straight forward in the game, and you can level up through it as well. I noticed that not only did I become more durable simply from leveling up, but that my damage always increased more from leveling than equipping a stronger weapon.
Mobs usually telegraph when they’re going to attack, so it’s easy enough to not get hit, though it can be unavoidable sometimes. Enemies like slimes will also release an AOE attack, and the game lets you know when it’s about to happen through a countdown that appears over the slime.
Some mobs have modifiers to make them more aggressive than others. For instance, an aggressive slime will usually attack you once you get in a certain radius while regular slimes will simply ignore you and let you carry about your business.
There are PvP elements to the game, but I decided to set up shop on a PvE server, so I haven’t experienced that aspect of the game yet. I do know that players can, of course, kill each other. The worlds aren’t very large, so I imagine this is something that could happen pretty frequently, and emphasizes why building base defenses are so important. Especially when you’re storing valuable items and resources in your base.
I’ve really enjoyed my time with the game so far. It’s the perfect podcast game because I can simply turn on a podcast or a video on my second monitor and just mindlessly play through the game.
That said, there are plenty of shortcomings. The game suffered from some serious connectivity issues. Until very recently, my character would do quite a bit rubberbanding. Other times, I’d be in the middle of mining something and my character would simply stop because the game needed to catch up to itself.
I’ve also had some issues getting a stable framerate. I tested the game with an i5-2500k OC’d to 4.5GHz and am running a single r9 290, and my framerate is anywhere between 22 - 56 FPS. I usually hovers between 28 - 34. The game still feels pretty smooth at some point, but taking a look at the minimum system requirements, you can definitely see that the developers haven’t gotten around to optimizing the game yet.
And then, of course, there is the lack of content. Don’t get me wrong, you can easily get 10 - 20 hours of gameplay here, but most of it is redundant grinding. Grinding for blueprints or grinding because you’ve got this really cool idea for a base that hangs off the mountains in the distance.
So, there you have it. The game is shaping up pretty well so far. The developers have put out 8 patches already to address the lag issue, and it’s considerably better than when I first picked up the game. Unfortunately, you might want to wait until they throw in some more content to justify the $20 price tag.
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