Immune Preview

Considering the rather ridiculous number of open-world survival games currently available, you really need something special to sell a brand new one. Online MMORPG elements? No, that’s certainly been done. Crafting? Hm, yeah, that’s in just about all of them. Zombies? OK, that’s got to be a joke, right? Provide a run-down of all the most basic ingredients for a modern open-world survival game and the recipe will provide you with Immune, a post-apocalyptic survival game that’s been in Early Access for a couple of months now. It’s an MMORPG, it features a crafting mechanic and yes, it even has zombies. Looking around at the tough competition, it’s hard not to feel sorry for developer Vidiludi. This is a market dominated by powerhouses like Day Z and Don’t Starve; it’s a tricky genre to break into as numerous failed projects can attest.

So ultimately, the question really is what does Immune do differently? That, sad to say, is where the initial problem arises. There’s not really anything here that would attract the casual Steam-browser apart from the genre to which the game clings to mercilessly. A game begins with your nameless hero in the middle of a predetermined map, and it’s your job to help him survive as long as possible by eating food and avoiding danger. As mentioned, that danger often comes in the form of zombies that infest various parts of the map. What’s more, there are a few squads of gas-masked goons held up in pivotal locations like an airport and army base. Like many survival titles, there’s not really an end game (at least not yet), so it’s all about exploration.

To help you through the lands you can find helpful equipment and weapons, and also craft items like a campfire or even doors to place on abandoned buildings. Vidiludi has noted that the crafting element of Immune still requires a lot of work, so right now there’s a very restricted selection of items, and none of them are especially difficult to create. Instead, you’ll be spending most of your time walking, or driving, through the map trying to find items that could help you fight back against the gas-masked enemies. Actually going toe-to-toe with them is a bit of a tall order at the moment, although that’s definitely for the best as there’d be little else to do otherwise.

If there’s one element of the game that’s a little more unique (although still not exactly original), is the ability to set up a base using the aforementioned doors. There are plans in place to make this aspect of Immune much more in-depth and I imagine it’ll be a feature that gains a lot of fans if it’s implemented properly. Holding down a developed base with a group of friends sounds like a lot of fun, especially if it’s in a world where others begin to raid it. Indeed, PvP and a persistent online world are also a key part of the game, although this is another aspect that should become more pronounced as the game develops. At the moment, it’s very unlikely that you’ll actually find someone in-game and if you do there’s a not a whole lot you can do together or against one another.

Jumping into a game of Immune with friends is currently the best way to enjoy the game, for obvious reasons. Assumedly, the plan is for groups of players to be traveling around together, so hopefully the servers start to become a little more populated as time goes by and the game comes closer to release. In short: there’s quite a lot of work to be done to achieve all of these aims. Having a functioning world, in which groups of players are interacting with each other, is no easy feat. It’s probably the reason Vidilud chose to release in Early Access, but that doesn’t stop the game from currently feeling like an incredibly limited experience.

It doesn’t help that there are problems with elements that are already a part of the game. The controls are simply all over the place. They’re unresponsive and completely unsatisfying. Combat doesn’t have any real impact and driving around the in the one available vehicle feels like you’re handling a dodgem rather than a 4x4. In many ways, these are symptoms of the top-down viewpoint and familiar blocky visuals, but it’s still unfortunate and hopefully something that will be improved for the final product. Indeed, at the moment that’s a statement that could be used for a lot of Immune. It’s not really worth playing in its current state, and only worth buying if you like the sound of the finished product and want to help the developer out. There’s nothing especially new here, and there’s currently a host of better products out there that can scratch your open-world survival itch.