This review has been a long time coming.  By that, I mean I’ve put it off for far too long and it’s about time that I get something posted before my editors show up at the proverbial door with a metaphorical tire iron and some choice words regarding what constitutes “enough time”.

Just kidding.  They’re awesome and haven’t pressured me at all.  Which is good!  Because this delay was actually warranted.  The reasons are specific to me, but that doesn’t make them any less valid.

When the opportunity came up to review How To Survive: Storm Warning Edition for PS4, my first response was “oh, I completely missed this game the first time around, I’d be happy to give it a go”.  It came along fairly early on in the current tidal wave of survival-focused games, but since it also contained zombies, I found myself lacking any real interest at the time.  Because just about everything contained zombies at the time.  I’d been burned already by Dead Island, which turned out to be a bit of a let-down, but was still on the hunt for a survival game that I could really enjoy.

People like to tout Don’t Starve as the quintessential “best survival game” to play, but I found it more annoying than enjoyable.  Those fucking voices just grate on my nerves and I can’t say I particularly care for the art style.  Those two things, coupled with the “quirky” take on science and creatures ended up putting me off almost entirely.  I’ve already mentioned Dead Island of being something of a damp squib, but in truth it came closer to the mark than just about anything else.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the hardcore games like DayZ, Rust and god knows whatever the hell else Steam is spewing out these days.  Almost all of them are early access, charging full price for unfinished content, relying almost entirely on the efforts of other people to create “emergent gameplay”.  Bollocks to that: survival, to me, is me vs. the game, not me vs. a bunch of other pricks who are out to ruin my day.

How To Survive: Storm Warning Edition was firmly back on the radar, simply due to the fact that nothing else was scratching the itch.

Playing it for the first time, I had no preconceptions.  I paid almost no attention to the game’s original incarnation, so if you’re looking for a review that compares the two, you’re out of luck.  I was dimly aware that it was greeted with mixed reviews, but otherwise went in with a completely open mind.  I can’t say that it lived up to my expectations, simply because I didn’t have any.  However, it didn’t live up to my hopes, either.

At its core, H2S on PS4 is a twin-stick shooter.  It closely resembles Dead Nation in both control style and attitude, if not necessarily atmosphere or aesthetic.  While this can lead to some clunky melee combat, it serves well enough when you get some ranged weaponry later on.  Combat is the meat and veg of the game, with crafting being a disappointingly thin gravy: there’s plenty of it, but not nearly as complex or meaningful as I’d have hoped.  I’m in two minds about the fact that crafting is done in a pause menu which makes you completely invincible: on one hand, no stress, but on the other, no sense of danger.

But when you combine the lacklustre crafting with the so-so combat, what you get is no worse than the cream of the crop you might see released today.  The two complement each other and provide a passable experience that was enough to keep me coming back for more.  But I feel it’s important to point out that when I say “passable” here, it’s actually much more of a compliment than it might appear to be.  In my seemingly never-ending quest to find a survival game that ticks all my personal boxes, H2S comes pretty close on a number of levels.

The story isn’t exactly great, but it has humour that goes beyond “science, lol”.  Kovac, author of the titular How to Survive guide you find in-game, is easily the best part of the plot.  His involvement may be rather two-dimensional, but when it comes to zombie survival games, I’m not looking for high prose.  It was enough to keep me engaged, but what I truly crave is something with a deep and involving story.

The gameplay is hit and miss.  As mentioned before, melee can be sluggish or awkward: ranged weaponry is clearly the way to go and is plenty satisfactory.  Splattering zombies left and right never gets old, which is good, because there’s no shortage of the bastards strewn across the various islands.  It’s a shame that they only really present a huge danger in massive numbers (even at night) due to the way the game lets you handle them.  Shining a torch at them is all you need to scare them off and when you have unlimited batteries, the night is no longer so dark nor full of terrors.

Crafting, survival and other development elements seem to be less fleshed out.  This, again, could just be due to my own personal desires not being met.  I’m not arrogant enough to expect a game to cater to my every wish, but no matter how much I know this to be true, it’s still disappointing when I see something fall short of a standard.  Would a scarcity of ammo have made the game any better?  If I’d been forced to craft certain items to tackle certain zombies, would the system have felt any more compelling?  I can’t say for certain, but it feels like a missed opportunity.

Given that this is, in effect, a GOTY edition of something that was released some time ago, the fact that all previously-existing DLC has been bundled in is nice, but perhaps not enough.  I don’t think that grand, sweeping changes would have been in order, but it feels like the developers didn’t really go to too much effort in making new content.  And by new, I don’t mean more of the same in a different flavour: BBQ chicken and Mexican chicken are still chicken.  Give me some beef or lamb to mix things up.

But, as always, the thing that ultimately matters is whether or not I enjoyed the game.  Regardless of its various shortcomings, How To Survive: Storm Warning Edition is a survival game that I would rate higher than its more popular cousins.  Don’t Starve and DayZ (which I will continue to use as polar opposite examples) are likely fine games, enjoyed by plenty.  But I will always continue to look for that one game which takes aspects of both and meets somewhere in the middle.  H2S comes closer than many, but isn’t quite as great as it could perhaps have been.

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