The Abandoned Review

The Abandoned is a first person survival game developed by Gaijin Distribution. You find yourself marooned on this rather nasty island, devoid of life, and must find a way to make your stay there a little more pleasurable, at least for the time being.

The quickest comparison I can make to this game is with The Forest. It’s basically if The Forest got ported to an iOS device and replaced the mutant cannibals with zombies instead. But, unlike that, the game is actually completed and fully playable to the extent that the developers wish you to experience.

Gameplay is your typical first person affair, with a virtual joystick appearing anywhere on the left screen when you apply pressure, as well as a button that will allow you to use whatever item you currently have equipped. There are also a number of UI prompts for you to make good use of; whether that’s throwing a stone to create a distraction or look around your backpack, it’s there.

Not only do you have general UI prompts, you also have three bars that you’re going to want to keep an eye on: health, hunger, and sanity. Having any one of those reach zero is generally a bad idea and is best to be avoided.

As you run around the landscape, you can pick up a whole assortment of resources to craft new weapons, tools, and items with to make your survival all the more simple. What the game does when you’re crafting an item is speed up time. So, if you’re making a shelter for yourself, the game will speed up the crafting process of it, to simulate a more realistic approach of wasting a day away to build a structure. Only downside to this I’ve seen so far, is that when you get attacked, or an enemy gets too close to you, the game doesn’t return you to the action. You could, in all fairness, just stand there at 4X speed, and have a zombie beat you to death, all because you looked away from your phone for just a moment. An easy fix for that would at the very least show some type of warning, just so you’re not exactly caught with your pants down, as it were.

Combat in The Abandoned isn’t too much of a focus really, as for the most part you will just find yourself swinging at the shambling zombie that’s currently in your face. Simply keep spamming the attack button and soon enough the corpse should fall down onto the ground and keel over. Other than that, there isn’t too much in-depth strategy to it, other than maybe dodging back or to the side every now and again.

The real focus for the game is in the survival nature of it. Now that, the game does manage to do a fairly good job of. Throughout the day, you’ll want to be scavenging around, seeing what you can find to help sustain your time on this island of doom. You’ll want to make this snappy, because the game will quickly rack up the fear factor when it starts to turn to night. I tell you what, the game recommends you don’t go far from the fire at night, and I believe them. It’s so incredibly dark and it only helps push out the creepy, terrifying atmosphere that the game does a good job when it’s not trying to push you into it. On top of all this, you have to wait for the day to roll around again, all the while you’re watching your bars slowly tick down, hoping that you will manage to make it to the next day alive and sane.

Atmosphere is one element of the game I feel it really has done to a top notch degree. There was one instance in the game where I was cutting down some trees and then my axe proceeded to break. Just before I started making another one, I heard gunfire in the distance. It was the first sign of life I had ever heard of, and it only ramped up the atmosphere for me from there.

When it comes down to it, the crafting system for the game isn’t anything all that special. It’s something we’ve seen before where you simply have to fill in the boxes and your character does all the work for you before get the item. So, for that reason I feel the crafting system is just kind of there and doesn’t warrant any real attention to it, honestly.

There are three game modes in The Abandoned: story, survival, and adventure. Survival is your typical sandbox survival game, where you see just how long you can survive in the wilderness without any real help from the game. Adventure has you do some kind of side quests that aren’t necessarily directly connected to the story. Story is where the meat of the game is and pretty much works as an extended tutorial for the other game modes, as it will teach you more or less everything you need to do throughout the game, all the while making you follow an intriguing story that gets better with each new find.

Graphically, the game doesn’t look all that bad. It isn’t really comparable when it comes to more AAA studios, but the graphics look fine. They’re not too bad, but they don’t get any real points for interest or originality.

One problem I’ve really had with the game as a whole is the UI. There have been times where I’ve come just a little too close to radiation, which starts to kill you, but because the indicator for radiation was so incredibly small on the HUD, it was pretty hard to notice on why I was dying. When it comes to mobile devices, the UI definitely tends to be just a tad too fiddly and really does warrant being played on a tablet device.

Overall, the game does show promise and has a fair amount to offer. The map you play on isn’t procedurally generated like other survival games which might dampen the replay factor of the game, but it does mean you can become more engrossed in your surroundings. Crafting in the game isn’t anything special, nor is the graphics, but the story really does pull you in, especially when you realise just how much atmosphere the game really does have. I have noticed, however, that some sentences don’t sound quite right, or may have a spelling error, but I’m sure that will get fixed in time.

The gist of it is, though, even with a bit of a wonky UI on mobile devices, The Abandoned does a decent amount to stand out, and can easily be considered one of the better contenders for top survival game on the iOS App Store.