How To Survive Storm Warning Review

How To Survive: Storm Warning Edition is available for Xbox One for $19.99 USD. It's a downloadable game and around 3GB in size. You'll get the original "crafting survival nightmare" as they call it plus six extra DLCs. Supposedly, this makes it "more fun an tougher than ever". Apparently my mileage may vary because I didn't find it all that fun.

The Premise

Here's the story in a nutshell. You wash ashore on an island that's filled with zombies. You need to fight, survive, and craft weapons and stuff. The map is made up of seven islands and you'll fight from one to the next.

The story isn't anything special but it doesn't need to be. In a world of games that over do the story I like the simplicity of games like this. Remember how fun Doom was? And it had zero story!

If anything, it has too much story dialog. I don't care what the half dead guy on the beach has to tell me. I'm not interested the boring "how to survive" survival guides that popup to explain how to play. It's bores me to watch those!

Gameplay

The game is an overhead shooter. The left stick controls character movement while the right controls the direction you aim in. Right trigger fires your weapon. It's all pretty easy to control and it works.

There are, however, times where it's hard to see your character because the camera is above some trees (etc) while you're under those trees (etc). I think they could do better with the camera but it's works well most of the time so not a huge flaw.

The maps are fairly boring and are basically about as fun as any paper maze you've ever played. Run around, come to a dead end, turn around and try again. Rinse. Repeat. Well, rinse and repeat while fighting off zombies and mutants that is.

The enemies vary from zombies to mutant things to tougher oddities. The fighting animations are all pretty good, relatively speaking, even if not special.

Graphics & Sound

The graphics are nothing special here. It's more on par with something you'd download and play on a mobile phone. It's certainly not flexing the Xbox One's muscles in any way.

That's not a bad thing, for what it is the graphics work just fine. The game is neither pretty nor ugly but it's just unimpressive in this department. The audio is also just fine, but nothing special at all.

Conclusion

For $20 it's hard to recommend How To Survive: Storm Warning Review for Xbox One. I only found it fun for 5-10 minutes and then boring and repetitive after that. It's not something I'd have any desire to play again. Even if you got it for free, like I did, it's not something I see myself picking up and playing again.

Still not sure? Watch our gameplay video and decide for yourself. If you want to pick it up you can do so from your Xbox One or Xbox.com.