7.4.2016

First up - installation is intentionally obfuscated by requiring you to use steam, yet not giving you a steam key in the package. Instead you have to register on the excalibur page. I see this as nothing more than eiher a grab for your data, or a way of giving out less keys than they print game copies and either way, I strongly recommend you give them as little data as you care to, and use a temporary throwaway address. They don't need to know your name and email. What exactly will it be used for?Once you have the steam key you stick that into steam and it installs from the internet. So why a CD? I'm wondering the same thing. It seems like you can install from the DVD, but you still have to use steam,so...well...unless your internet is slow, why would you bother?650mb download by the way on steam. On my 70mb internet, it was done by the time I'd written the review so far, so quite quick.First boot, first thought is that the game is quite resource intensive! My laptop isnt a gaming laptop, but it's got a dedicated nvidia graphics card and an i5, and it's struggling. You're going to need a "proper graphics card" for this - something <5 years old and > £50 at time of purchase, at a ballpark guess. The minimum spec according to the docs seems a lot lower than you'd want if you want to play it at any decent resolution.Now I'm only just into the game really, but it occurs to me that this isn't a zombie game. Why did I think it was? I suppose I made the assumption based on the name and logo- they're using the "zombie font" surely? :)Once you start walking around in the game you realise why it's so resource intensive - every blade of grass is rendered as a single object by the looks of it, which looks great - well, it doesn't look great but its a good effect seeing them move and walking among them. Reminds me of a benchmark app actually. It's quite immersive.The controls are pretty standard for moving around, picking stuff up is a bit unusual, you right click to look and left click (while still holding right click) to pick stuff up. It's fine, it works.However - one thing of note - there is (apparently) no controller support at all. Being someone who likes to use a controller, this is disappointing.The protagonist (main character) is not very easy on the eye. He has these unusually fat arms and weird hair - I'm not sure, it just feels like the developer just struggled to get human features right. It's forgivable except you have to stare at this the whole time you're playing unless you change view, which I'm quite inclined to do.I found it really fiddly to pick stuff up - the game needs to "snap" to an item when you're looking at it, all the hunting around with the controls to try to centre my cursor on the item I'm just trying to pick up actually made me feel a bit dizzy. It's much more agreeable in "FPS" mode - which you switch to by using the P key.So let's talk about combat. Well during my first two "plays" I encountered a wolf dog thing. The in-game help system told me to "press F to focus" which I did, then it killed me. I tried just about every button to hit the thing, but no. I just stood there while it killed me. Same happened in the second play through.So I looked at the controls setting to see which button is "hit". There isn't one. What?So I had to look at youtube playthroughs to try to figure it out. Apparently you have to use items on enemies, but you can only use them once?! Meaning you can only use a stick once to hit a dog, which won't kill it. And you die.Now at this point, if I wasn't reviewing this copy for amazon vine, I'd already have gone back to fallout 4, let me just say that. However, I'm compelled to carry on trying. It's not engaging me at all. Maybe it's just not my type of game? I've only been a gamer since the late 80s so what would I know, right?Let's have another go, and try to get some weapons. ho hum.So...what are we on now, play 3? Oh, you die in the game, you die in the game, by the way. I don't seem able to load old saves. Grr.I'm walking around, I get hungry and thirsty. You can use food to resolve hunger but you have to equip a bottle of water, then right click it to drink it. Wait, you use food and drink differently? Seriously?At this point I'm thinking hey, this sorta looks like maybe a later myst game, but with a sort of farcry 3 feel to it. And I start to remember how much fun I had with farcry 3. And how fond my memories of riven (myst 2) are. And my mind wanders. And I'm just walking around in the game. Still haven't found a stick or any sort of weapon. Unless an empty water bottle will do.This time I don't get killed so quickly, mainly because I decide to randomly swim across a body of water. This in game world, wherever it is, is quite big, I think. But I don't have a map so..yeah I would have liked a map. Do you get a map? Well there's one in the back of the manual! I don't normally look at manuals but this game is giving me no guidance at all so I turn to the manual in hopes of some idea what I'm supposed to be doing. It's not much help but there is a map and some indication that I can make stuff! Like a wicker house! Why would I want to do that? No idea?At this point, I'm sorry, I'm kinda done with this game. I've been playing it what, nearly an hour, and I still don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. Or what the point is. Or how to play it.So I'm going to try to do a TL;DR summary:- It looks nice, but feels unfinished, it needs more in-game guidance, it needs a point. It doesn't necessarily need a story, but you do need to feel like you have a reason to be struggling onwards and not pressing "quit to desktop". It's always a shame to have to give a less than favourable review of a game, because it's obvious a lot of time has gone into making it. But I just can't see that I'll be playing it any further.

15.4.2016

A survival game that reminds me of the "stranded" type games of the nineties and early noughties (in fact, I swear it seems to be a glorified version of the free German games "Stranded" and "Stranded II" (only with 5% of the content). You play an unknown male who ends up stranded on a small cluster of desert islands in the middle of nowhere, he wakes up in a coffin and has no idea where he is or why he is there and all he has is a photograph as a clue.And this is basically all the story you get. You are then planked on an island with no instruction, tutorial or any kind of indication of what keys to use leading you to die very easily during your first few runs in the game. And there'll be many runs.Although you can "save" in this game, it's basically a "permadeath" deal (think hardcore minecraft). So basically you spend two hours trying to collect clues and find your way off the island and guess what, random death, a panther or a crocodile comes around. I've actually seen death for no reason despite hunger and thirst are both fine.There are very few resources in the game (some seem to respond as far as I can tell) and there is no actual clues as to how you can get some of them (it took me an HOUR to figure out how to get wooden sticks just to build a campfire). You can get food and drink easily enough at least but there's random wildlife planked around the island and some of them you can't even see well (or at all). The game tells you to "hit F to lock target" and you do so with nothing happening. You can hit the tab key for perception mode which will highlight clues, but this happens so quickly, you're likely to miss most of them. For the most part, the game seems to be running and swimming from small island to island picking up keys that never seem to unlock anything and subsequently getting murdered by bloody animals or dying for no apparent cause.Quite frankly, I would enjoy this game far better if they had implemented a "save" feature that lets you return to a previous part of the game if you die. I don't want to spend three hours in a game just to die for a stupid reason because the game doesn't work when it tells you F will target something for example.A few niggles that annoy me (for those who want an abbreviated version of my review):1: The game requires Steam. Fair enough, however Steam offers very limited support and several users including myself cannot log into their website, meaning I can't actually get any support or help with the game.2. The game requires that you actually go to the developers (Excalibur Games) site and REGISTER there with a ridiculously finicky long 32 character key to get the product key for Steam. So basically you're registering the game twice. Usually when a company enforces rules like this to get a second product key it's so they can sell your email address and name onto third party sites so they can spam you with advertisements. If my inbox starts getting filled with rubbish that I did not subscribe to, I will be very annoyed.3. The perma-death thing makes me really not want to play, I don't like wasting my time, and dying because the game as poor controls, a rubbish frame rate, and no instructions is irritating as hell. I wouldn't mind Permadeath in online play, but not in a single player campaign. They need to give an optional "reload" for those who don't want to relive the same hour over and over. Deja vu is boring.4. The game has such limited resources that it literally gets quite boring and predictable fairly early on. To be honest, if you're looking for a game of this ilk, I'd suggest "Ark: Survival Evolved", which is basically like this, but with Dinosaurs, and far more crafting recipes and much more to explore and build. To really justify what this game costs, there should be far more story and far more resources and things to find, build and do. Even independent games on steam are far better than what this is priced at (hell, even Minecraft is cheaper and has 400x more content).5. The swimming in the game is painfully slow and it seems to be the only way to get from island to island as far as I can see, so this should really be addressed.6. Controls are finicky. "Hit 'F' to target enemy" I think the prompt is. It does NOTHING. Tab for perception mode is far too fast in highlighting what's around you (and seems to miss items also).7. You are dropped into the game with absolutely no instruction whatsoever...not even a tutorial on how to move. If I hadn't played Minecraft for years, I wouldn't have known how to run, walk and attack (set up is roughly the same).8. Frame rate is a bit choppy and sometimes the movements of the character are all over the place.I enjoyed the game until I kept dying spontaneously. It's just too tedious reliving the same hour, finding the same 4 keys that seem to open nothing and then getting the "You have died" message with no explanation of from WHAT.Needs a lot of work. If it's going for £2.99, buy it, but it's not worth asking price unless they tart it up and add more fun features. If this was like Ark: survival evolved or Minecraft where they continually add new features and things to do, it'd be worth the asking price.I'll add, this does have online mode but I'm not even going to bother, it's hard enough repeating single player.

23.4.2016

The installation process and integration with Steam are fine. Registering with Excalibur Games to get your Steam code is a bit odd but OK. These points from other reviews are largely irrelevant. So - and here's some innovation for you - I'm going to review the actual game.It's pretty poor. I'm sorry, but it is. I'm stunned by the 3 star average this title is getting on Amazon, I really am. I know it's from an independent developer and publisher, and I can appreciate the nucleus of a decent idea here, but it has been so poorly implemented that there is no fun to be had.The premise is that you need to survive on a mysterious island. Your character doesn't apparently know why he's there,and he starts with nothing to aid his survival. You must then traverse the island, looking for supplies to craft and keep you alive, whilst working out what's going on. If you die, that's it. There are no reloads, no checkpoints, nothing. You can save anywhere, but upon death your save is wiped and you can't try again. I get that this is supposed to add extra tension to the gameplay and setting, but really it's just frustrating and annoying.Better Late than Dead is basically a spreadsheet masquerading as a more adult-orientated Minecraft. The statistics in the spreadsheet (Hunger, Thirst, Stamina, Freezing (yes, really, that's an attribute of your character) all have on-screen bars. If they fill up the impact ranges from you can't run to you die. Instantly.In one game, my character started with no shirt. He was instantly cold, and it then started raining, so his 'Freezing' stat started filling up fast. I ran to a hut on the beach and whilst inside, the bar started going down. I stood there for a minute or two. The rain stopped. I went back outside. A bit warmer. It was gripping.On another occasion, I found a small village and was wandering around looking for stuff to pick up and reading notes (the game has a pseudo-Lost vibe going on, with notes scattered around talking about animals, science and apparent trouble between the staff) when I noticed my hunger bar getting quite full. I had no food on me, so I started searching the immediate area as fast as I could. The bar filled up. I died. Start again.Then there's stamina. If the bar fills up, you can't run and can only walk. Even if your guy is in imminent danger of being eaten, he'll just start strolling when that bar is full. Plus the walking is slooooow so on a big island with no public transport, it becomes a bit of a chore.You will often come across the local wildlife, and for the slightly more docile creatures (boars, deer), if you've found a knife you can take them on. The game will emit a growling sound and invite you to look on to your target with the F key. If in long grass or trees, you often can't see the creature so locking on is impossible. Anyway, you might be able to kill them with the knife. Panthers and crocodile are virtually insta-death though. Not fun.The general thrust of the game is to find items and craft other gear for you to use. The included manual shows what you can combine to make things you need. The layout is basic but it mostly makes sense. The problem is, you spend hours picking up various items, craft them and then die of hunger or from walking too close to a crocodile and you can get just a bit despondent. And go and play something else which doesn't make you feel like you are wasting your life.The presentation of the game is just bad. Your character is pretty simply modelled, and so is almost everything else. Animation is at a premium and even for an indie game, in 2016 shouldn't this look a little better? The wildlife are especially pathetic, with crocodiles looking like particularly benign logs until you get closer. They slide up to you and you die. No animation, nothing. The sound design and music aren't much better. The latter has an ominous vibe and is OK without adding much to the atmosphere.The water is well modelled though. I enjoyed looking at it.The controls, assuming you are using keyboard and mouse, are OK. Incredibly though, when sprinting (at least, what approximates it) you can't move laterally. You can when walking, but not running. It's as if the developer has allowed Shift to be pressed with forward and backwards keys but that's it. Bizarre.There are some who will find the tension and mystery entertaining, I'm sure. But as a piece of entertainment and a game, Better Late Than Dead just isn't good enough. It isn't fun, it isn't nice to look at and it isn't clever. It's dull, uninspiring and ultimately there are better examples of survival horror or crafting games out there and you should seek those out instead.

27.4.2016

A valiant effort with an marginally interesting story, but there are far too many problems to make it enjoyable.This game requires Steam, and for some reason you have to register with the companies website to get your steam-key.Starting the game, the menus are Ok, and you can rebind your keys, change visual settings etc. I turned my video settings up and rebound to my preferred key selection and went into the single player game.It starts with a montage of paintings which gives a kind of setting to the rest of the story. You then "wake up" on a beach, find a backpack and start exploring.Immediately it became obvious that if you have rebound your keys or inverted your mouse,you are going to have problems with this game. Changing the "sprint" key to anything other than the default means it stops working completely. If you invert your mouse, the looking system becomes almost unusable: as you pull your mouse down to move the cursor, the view moves upwards at the same time - which makes clicking on things absolutely ridiculous.Graphics wise the game looks like last-generation. The models are low polygon and the textures are lifeless. The animations on the main character are stilted and the transitions between stances have no smoothing at all and are very jarring. The shadows are very low quality, even when turned up, and when the main character is standing on a hill, he will cast a shadow down into the valley, while the hill he is standing on won't, making it look like he's floating 40ft in the air...If you try to put a key in a door, or scoop water from a bowl into a bottle, the character will not move to perform the action, he'll just do it wherever he currently is - leading to him trying to open thin air, or scoop up sand - but low-and-behold, the bottle now has water in anyway - this is very jarring.Later in the game you will start to meet enemies and the combat system is painful - just clicking to hit a wolf with a knife. There is no subtlety to it, you just have to click on the wolf.There are also deeper problems which could have solved very easily. At one point I was walking along a wall and brushed against it, and saw straight through to the other side of the wall and into the interior of the cliff - where there was a secret lab. This lab is meant to be hard to find and located somewhere secret on the island, but because of this I now knew exactly where it was. I know this is an issue with the game-engine and the player-camera poking through the polygons and showing the inside - but would it have been too hard to create an interior wall to the boulder - just slightly smaller so I would see that instead of the islands big secret - very silly mistakes.There are other issues with sound and music, (the "tense" music when you enter a dangerous area pops up and down making no sense) and gameplay (invisible walls) and graphics (one of the buildings has an actual TREE poking through the wall and ceiling - was this game tested AT ALL?) but listing them all would take all day.It feels more like a university project or amateur attempt than a proper released game. I'm pretty sure no testing was done it at all because there are issues that would have been caught by even the most elementary QA.

27.3.2016

The survival genre is rather packed right now, with many of the games emerging from Early Access on Steam. Better Late Than Dead is a fairly standard entry. Washed up in a procedurally generated landmass, you'll need to scavenge, craft, build and fight to survive the ordeal.Graphically it's pleasant enough, however I scaled it down from 1920x1080 and found the game world a little easier on the eyes. That could have been the limitation of my Nvidia card though (GTX670) although is an uncommon requirement for any of my 3D games. The animations however are poor and look rather wooden. Finding items can be tricky and there is a often needed Perception mode to be able to locate items which blend in with the scenery.

30.3.2016

Better Late Than Dead is yet another survival game that gives you no clues as to the goal, bar a short introduction as to why you are stuck on a desert island with nothing to keep you safe.Your first motivation comes from keeping those bars on the bottom left of the screen short by staying safe, finding food and drink and resting. The food and drink isn't too hard to find at first as the game hands it to you, but it does later become an issue. Wondering around you find huts and other signs of life with notes that help further the story and also give you clues to survive.The world is also full of pitfalls and perils that are ready to sneak up, jump out and chomp on you with huge teeth.

10.4.2016

Just reading about the installation process in the manual infuriated me so much that I actually started writing this review along side the game's installation.So firstly, you need a Steam account, if you don't already have one it's like starting at Step-3 before you're able to start Step-1.For those that don't know what "Steam" is: Steam is like a digital library of games that you have purchased through your steam account - the Amazon Prime of games, if you will.I'd have thought most people who have "Steam" wouldn't bother buying the physical item, the Game DVD-ROM, and that those who like to have the physical item to have possession of something real, probably wouldn't like the ideaof digital purchases to have bothered much,

15.4.2016

Ok so I am going to parrot the same thing as Everyone else here.I do not like the installation process. There was a similar game I had a few weeks ago and it took some time to realise that the key you get can’t be input into Steam and that you need to connect to the manufacturer’s website and then get a key from them before you can download the content from Steam. Now I do like steam as it’s great for being able to get a new PC, download the app and bingo … all your games are there and you can download whatever you want to play. So that’s the good news. I, like another reviewer, are deeply suspicious that the real reason they have made this so convoluted is so they can get your personal data to spam you with adverts later.

23.4.2016

As others have noted the first annoying thing is that you have to have a steam account to play this game. I appreciate that there is an online element to the game but the new desire to have everyone who uses a game have an account is an annoying one amongst games companies. Once you've been through this though you find yourself in a fairly straightforward point and click adventure with an annoying wolf who comes and savages you just as you're making headway in the game. It's actually quite detailed. Day turns to night. If it rains you have to watch your body temperature, if you're exerting yourself you have to watch your stamina. It does have the usual issue of point and clicks in that while you can imagine using some objects in a creative way,

7.4.2016

Better late than dead is a 3rd person rendered island survival game. After being hoisted overboard in a make shift coffin you find yourself washed up on a island unsure who you are, why your here and who is the child in the picture in your pocket? Your main objective is to survive and find a means of escape. This is done by finding items and using them through the use of a crafting interface in order to make yourself items that will be of use to you during your ordeal.The game has a weather system that can change in the blink of an eye. One minute your in holiday sunshine the next battling against gale force stormy weather.

20.5.2016

There are parts of this game that really don’t work well and suggest a lack of thought going into the concept and design. If you want t light a fire you, of course, need firewood. The smashed crates, wooden buildings and packing cases seem ideal but the game says no, you instead have to find a tree with a particular colour leaf, and a trunk that’s about three feet across, and shake it three times with your bare hands to dislodge some sticks from above. Leaving the improbable physics of being able to shake such a large tree with sufficient force to dislodge branches aside, it just doesn’t sit right.If you don’t read the tutorials telling you what to do then there is a lot of wandering around and seeing which bits of environment you can interact with the answer is not as many as I hoped.

2.4.2016

This is a PC game suitable for ages 12+. My son usually plays Xbox, but was willing to give a PC game a try. The idea behind that is that your character is alone on a desert island and needs to survive. To do this, you need to find food, rest, shelter and to keep safe. That is easier said than done – especially with all sorts of predators lying in wait and ready to pounce. These include wolves, bear and crocodiles and they really do chomp your character to pieces, so beware of letting younger children see this. I liked the story idea behind this.There is a lot to explore, but so far my son doesn’t seem to have found his way off the island – which is presumably the ultimate aim. However,

18.4.2016

First I did not like the install if you do not have one you have to have a steam account which I did not want. At least if I get any junk emails addressed to a Mr No Steam I will know where they come from. It is supposed to be loadable from the disc but I could not find out how and it downloaded from the internet. It was a fairly large download and quite slow which might be important if you have a capped internet connection.Well eventually it was up and running the graphics were quite good but resource hungry.It said in the blurb that it was reminiscent of original point and click games, this is true but unfortunately not the better ones.So much depends on collecting things and using together

19.4.2016

I received this game and sat on the review for a while I simply could not make my mind up.Just like my fellow reviewer A Cresswell I’m finding hard not to ‘parrot’ (good description that Mr C) the rest of the reviews.This is not a stonking fabulous 5 star game then again it is perhaps worth more than 3 stars.Now the work Steam will come up a lot in all the reviews.Without Steam you are like a paddle steamer with a broken boiler and no coal.Stationary.I really would urge to read the other reviewers on here rather than my repeating their points slightly rephrased.Steam is liked by quite a few people but like many I’m thinking why do I need a disc to load it up?Heck if I have to (heaven forbid)

16.5.2016

This is quite an underwhelming game. There's no real instruction so you spend all your time wandering around just trying to survive and hoping to stumble across some sort of landmark that may give you more information to further the story. Even this basic stumbling around is difficult due to odd controls and lack of responsiveness in game to your use of the controls. You can easily end up going in circles as you don't get a map - you can't even map out the areas you've already explored. The most irritating thing though is that you can spend potentially hours building and finding materials etc, only to get randomly killed by an animal that you don't see coming and don't have any real chance to fight.

Better Late than Dead (PC) - Reviews

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