Your intrepid heroes start a fire, die of exposure, and crash to desktop. Frozen State faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: Frozen State
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/270270/
Devel: Flox Studios
Engine: Unity 5
Price: 11.99 / CDN 12.99
Wazzat: Frozen State is a brutal, survival game set in a world embraced by the man-made ice age meant to protect mankind from pestilent hybrids. Bitter cold and numbing fear are the constant companions in the journey through the retro-futuristic Frozen State world.
Disclosure: Flox Studios sent us the keys.
CHAIRQUISITION:
Makes with the working
V-
- Just had a game start with E disabled.
- Killed and crashed.
J-
- I’ve gotten stuck in the walls and between furniture a few times
- And at least one crash when dying
P-
- Died 3 times when exploring a building and the game crashed
- Now, everytime I die the game crashes.
- The FerPS hold a steady 60, which for a Unity game is impressive.
- Until you start to notice the dirty hacks the game pulls to achieve that.
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
- The character animation and movement really brings the jank.
J-
- It kind of reminds me of a late PS1 Game
- The sounds are there. They try to do an approaching/listening mechanic, but that’s just not a thing that happens
P-
- The game obscures everything you’re not looking at.
- Which in a technical sense explains how a relatively open area in Unity isn’t tanking the FerPS.
- But it also makes everything stupidly dark.
- I guess that’s also to hide the fact that the monsters have 2 or 3 different animations a pop, including the walk cycle.
- I get it! It’s the old “The monster remains all the scarier the less you see of it” mantra.
- How did that work for Cloverfield?
- The guns sound piss weak, to the point where you opening and closing a door sounds louder than a freakin’ revolver!
- I can’t give it 1 chair here on accounts that it technically works, but it has done nothing to earn a higher score.
Total-
Control
V-
- It “””works””” technically.
J-
- This thing controls like a butt
- Pedro is right on target with the brigador comparison
- There’s a mode that has the camera follow the cursor, and that’s janky as fuck
- The crafting UI needs some work. Maybe a search feature?
- Combat in this can eat a bag of dicks
P-
- It’s not as bad as Brigador, even though it does that exact same stupid thing of moving forward from the perspective of the camera and not from from your reticle is aiming at.
- Where it’s better is the fact that it lets you reorient the camera
- And if you hate your right click, you can hold it down for ever and at that point the camera will always spin with the reticle and forward means you walk where you’re aiming.
- That said, this is still an annoying ass control scheme.
- And it doesn’t end there!
- “Would you like to change directions while moving? Aha, fuck you!”
- The moment you try, your character pauses the movement for a full second and turns to face the direction you told it to move in.
- Then, if you have the gall to try and switch weapons in the middle of combat, your character will once again stop everything he/she is doing and ensure you’ll get your face bitten off by one of the post-apocalyptic monstrosities du jour.
Total-
FUN
V-
- Another survival game… joy of fk mothering joys.
- “Part human, part evil”
- Quit reading the boring arse-intro right there, Brad.
- That inventory menus is… layered.
- Combat is rubbish.
- This is a walkabout, build a fire, and DIE simulator on a budget.
- But wait, there’s more!
- It keeps crashing when I get killed to death and I get killed to death often.
- It’s a bad sign when a game nopes to the desktop and your first thought is “glad that’s over”
J-
- I managed to survive one day
- These sorts of survival games don’t really appeal to me
- Compounded with the lackluster gameplay, poor controls and just damn dying all the time, this game doesn’t do much to improve my opinion of the genre
- The exploration element has a weird death road to canada style segmenting system that doesn’t do much in terms of adding any exploration
- At least in this I don’t die for no reason, I die because it’s way too cold
P-
- The UI is impressive.
- You have four different tabs on the left side and another four on the right side, you can have any combination of tabs open provide it’s one from either side.
- Besides that, you can also right click on just about everything everywhere.
- But it all looks like someone drew those rounded-corner rectangles in MS paint and then used the bucket with whatever shade of CRT green they found and filled in the blanks.
- The amount of work that went into the UI functionality is impressive. I’m going to start using Frozen State’s UI system to compare other games to!
- That said, I couldn’t do that with anything else in the game.
- Your journal says you need to find some parts to fix the “War Rig” the introductory plot dump shows under.
- So you go around doing the usual survival bullshit with a janky camera, a character that moves like he/she has Parkinson’s disease and a stupid fucking annoying combat system.
- Oh yeah! The combat in this game sucks big fat titties!
- The moment you run out of bullets, you might as well throw yourself at the nearest hostile thing you find.
- Instead of taking a quick but effective swing of an axe, your character feels like they’ve been a bit under-appreciated and has to do a little twirly ballet move before the swing proper.
- And the only thing that does is guarantee you’re gonna get munched on after/during each swing animation.
- This is bad design!
- Oh and the guns which fire the bullets I mentioned earlier? They sound and feel like you’re blowing spitballs out of a hollowed out ballpoint pen.
- And, for a game which is very obviously trying desperately hard to build up an atmosphere, it fails miserably!
- 30 mins of dealing with my character being too cold or too hungry or too thirsty, is about all I could muster in one go.
- So no, it’s not fun.
- It’s desperately trying to introduce the survival elements du jour to a formula which was “popular” in 2006-7.
- STALKER’s, Shadowgrounds’ and Fallout’s inspirations are very much on display.
- Unfortunately it fails in just about every aspect that made those games fun.
Total-
Final –
- You know what the great things about not having kids are? You get to not worry about their every need at all hours of the day and you save a ton money not doing so. So why, in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, would you spend money to babysit a virtual post-apocalyptic baby?
