Stranded: Alien Dawn (PS5) – Review
Your survivors in Stranded: Alien Dawn will find themselves in an entirely new environment after stumbling out of the wreckage of their escape pod. They are marooned on a foreign planet and must overcome incredible obstacles in order to establish a new life there and eventually escape.
You’ll have to start foraging for supplies from the crashed spaceship and guiding your survivors in the construction of temporary shelters, storage, and campfires right away in Stranded: Alien Dawn. To slowly work your way back up to harnessing sci-fi technology, you will need to adapt to your environment fast by researching the local flora and fauna to learn what is edible, what can be utilised for crafting, and which creatures can be tamed.
There’s a lot to do, and it’s easy to overwhelm your survivors with impossible-to-accomplish chores or those that require resources they don’t have. It takes a lot of time to mine rocks, chop down trees, and bang together your first building just so you can put some beds in it. After that, you must install sleeping quarters. All the while, that could detract from making sure that people are fed, that crops are fertilised, and that your brightest survivor can do nothing more than sit at a table and contemplate each new technological advancement for another day.
That equipment is obviously crucial to your survival and ability to coordinate rescue with passing ships. This is the groundwork for constructing solar panels, wind turbines, electric stoves, a tailor’s bench for more durable garments, 3D printers to eliminate tedious manual labour, and cutting-edge weaponry and defences, all of which can be powered by the sun and the wind.
Even though most of the local wildlife is relatively tame, you still need to be prepared for the off chance that an animal attacks you; this can happen for a variety of reasons, including the animals’ insatiable desire to feast on your crops. Eventually, you’ll face a wave of foes so numerous and powerful that you can’t possibly survive without fortifying your base with walls, towers, and other fortifications. I learned the hard way that trying to keep out six huge mantises with a stone wall only waist height was doomed to failure. With the addition of mechs and other features, players now have a fighting chance against even the largest of animals in the game’s final release.
Your survivors’ mental and physical well-being are also crucial. You can get the most out of each one thanks to their unique statistics, skills, and the game’s built-in system for allocating time and assigning tasks. They are all vulnerable to the stressors of their new lives, which can manifest as anything from a minor injury or illness to a more likely (and quite reasonable) mental collapse. You may combat this by providing a range of entertainment options, from dart boards and playing steel pans to more varied meals and other amenities.
Three alternative scenarios are provided to help mix things up for repeated tries. In addition to the usual crash landing, there are also missions to construct a prosperous trading post or a military presence on this foreign world. These are fantastic if you want to bypass the beginning of the game in favour of getting to the meat of the game—building a massive base—as soon as possible. This is possible because you begin with six characters and a plethora of high-end weaponry and electrical knowledge. In order to gain access to more advanced technologies, such as mech suits, you will still need to study the local flora and fauna.
Several ‘Moons’ that can modify random events and a variety of difficulty settings are also at your disposal. Turning off animal attacks, for example, is crucial to enjoying the game more calmly, because they assist you achieve your goals. Alternatively, if you’re a RimWorld fan, you can increase the difficulty. Despite the added diversity provided by the aforementioned modifiers and the three contrasted settings, only two biomes are actually used in this remixed content. If Haemimont has any plans for upgrades or new features after the release, I’d love to know about them.
When playing the game before it is released, there are a few minor bugs, such as characters switching to sleep mode or animating at an angle opposite of what they should, and the hilarious way that survivors will use any nearby object as a practise target and fire rapidly at it, even if that means shooting directly over the heads of their fellow survivors who are eating lunch. I really, truly, hope this will never be altered.
There are a few quirks in the control scheme that become apparent when playing on a console. Use the D-pad to easily navigate between the interface’s many sections (people and resources at the top, alerts on the right, buildings and management at the bottom, and item panels on the left). But the control mechanism isn’t as straightforward as it could be. When you push left after selecting a character, the game doesn’t automatically switch to that character’s information tab. There are a few too many steps required to accomplish anything, and it’s simple to accidentally navigate away from a particular UI component, requiring yet additional steps to re-enter it.
You can pause the game whenever you need to make adjustments, and Haemimont Games did a good job of porting the game from PC to console.
You can develop a hunter-gatherer settlement, rediscover technology and make a daring escape, or establish a fortified military outpost in Stranded: Alien Dawn, depending on whether being cut off from civilization is your worst nightmare or wildest fantasy. Although it suffers from a lack of variety in terms of themes and could use some polish in terms of console controls and user interface, it nevertheless manages to build an interesting sci-fi spin on the survival management sim genre.
