After running a new community member through an ArmA 3 mission, we were looking for something new to check out to spend the rest of our night playing. I'd been somewhat curious about Unturned, having seen a bit of PvP footage that made the game look kind of interesting. Plus it was free and quick to download. So three of us threw up a server and hopped in.
The visuals are pretty charming despite their low fidelity. It's not just another Minecraft clone, and it sets itself apart from Day Z just from the amount of color in the environments. It looks quaint but that aesthetic is actually a bit misleading. The game is extremely deep and is a lot more than just a Day Z clone like it might appear at first blush.
The game's initial gameplay loop is such: wander around the open, pastoral landscape searching for supplies to help you survive the current zombie... situation. There are small towns and farmsteads dotting the terrain, as well as a few military installations and some other neat little spots. Each is a source of various resources, everything from ammunition and weaponry to clothing to food and drink. And each of these is essential for survival. The player has to manage four statuses pertaining to their survival:
Health is pretty standard, you take damage and it goes down. If you start bleeding, you will continue to loose health until you use a bandage. Other statuses will quickly drain your health as well once they degrade too far. There are a number of medical supplies that will help you manage your health.
Then there's hunger and thirst, which can be replenished by various foods and beverages that can be found around the environment.
Disease is the last status, which goes up when you consume contaminated food and drink sources. There are ways to purify these sources but sometimes you don't have that option, so it's a balancing game between disease and hunger/thirst.
For us, it was a bit of a struggle to keep our thirst and hunger taken care of. It's something the early game could maybe use some help on. Most of what we found was spoiled and there's no reliable way to get water until you get certain items like a canteen. You can use that to drink from bodies of water, but you can't drink directly from them.
But once we started to get things together better, we realized that we needed to set up a camp somewhere we could fortify and produce food, and preferably near a source of water. We found a small farm with a tiny farm house and a barn. It even had fields we could plant crops in and a well for water. We found a few seeds and started a small garden. We cleared a few trees in the area and started work on a second building that we could use for living quarters and storage.
The first few nights were rough. We still couldn't drink, but we had a small source of food to keep us going. We were able to keep the place secure when we found a generator and several work lights, and when we found a canteen on a scouting trip to the local gas station, we were able to lower it down into the well and suddenly we had a source of water. Things were looking up. We started finding more advanced weaponry, rifles with high end optics and we even had a decent amount of ammunition.
I started to set up a reinforced position on the roof of the barn. I had a high powered rifle and wanted a spot to watch over the road in case of bandits or approaching undead. Turned out to be a decent spot to bag a few decent deer as well, which helped bolster our food supply.
Eventually, we managed to find some relatively operational vehicles, got some fuel for them, and brought a few vehicles back to the camp. Things were getting pretty comfortable. We'd set up a few cots in the house our friend had erected. We had a cozy fire in the little space between all of the buildings for cooking and the like. Even set up some lighting for the buildings.
And that was when I realized we had been playing for nine hours straight. And this was only the second time we'd played with the new member of our little group.
The game really surprised all of us. It's got far more mechanics than I thought, and those mechanics have more complexity than we ever expected. It goes down to the point of being able to reload magazines with loose ammunition you find around, crafting weapon attachments, constructing buildings, and a whole lot more.
For such an early project with such humble origins, it's extremely impressive. And a hell of a lot of fun. We're planning on expanding our plans to play this game to some light RP faction based stuff with two factions struggling to survive in opposition of one another.
If anyone is interested in joining in on our Unturned server, hop on Unity Operation's TeamSpeak: 198.12.122.131 We also play a bunch of other games as well!
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