➤ Horror manual 🎮

A year after its release on digital platforms, the authors of How to Survive come up with an "extended" version of the game for next-gen systems, which aims to offer a very complete package. Well, let's start from the end: what does the Storm Warning Edition have more than the original edition? In addition to remastered graphics at 1080p and a frame rate that in this case does not suffer from noticeable drops in the most hectic situations, the title of EKO Software arrives on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (as well as on PC, with an all-inclusive pack) with all included. the DLC released so far, so as to guarantee an even more full-bodied experience. The downloadable contents in fact see the introduction of a fourth character, Nina (who joins the already present Abby, Jack and Kenji), as well as some extra objects and two new modes: "A single chance to escape" and "Barricades" .

The first represents a distinctly hardcore interpretation of a game that in itself offers a challenge that is anything but trivial, providing us with a single life to survive the nightmare of an island that is only apparently deserted, actually populated by hordes. of the living dead who can't wait to taste our meat. The second is also characterized by a hardcore survival-style approach, since we are asked to protect two of our friends (one of them dying and forced on a stretcher) from the attack of the zombies for as long as possible. The assault takes place at night, so we will have the opportunity to explore the scenario during the day to collect useful resources to build barricades (in fact) and defense devices, so as to withstand the weight of the invasion and end up with a club the undead who will be able to overcome unscathed the walls that we will have erected to protect the area. The two new modes also support cooperative multiplayer, both locally and online, alongside those that those who have tried How to Survive already know well, namely the "Story Mode" and the "Challenge Mode", respectively a multifaceted campaign, with specific missions and a accompanying storyline, and a group of eight rather difficult challenges, each set in a different location. During our tests we encountered quite a few difficulties in accessing the online sector, but we assume that this is perhaps due to the novelty of the title and therefore to the lack of a large number of users willing to explore the cooperative mechanics rather than focusing primarily on the single game. player.

The Storm Warning Edition confirms the strengths and weaknesses of the original version of How to Survive

PlayStation 4 Trophies

The twelve Trophies contained in How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition are quite simple to obtain, as it is enough to visit all the locations of the game, the main missions and the secondary ones. It is more complicated to complete the campaign on the higher difficulty levels, since the zombies do not joke ...

Dead and oxen of your countries

If you've already read one of our How to Survive reviews (here the Xbox 360 version, here the Wii U version), you already know what we're talking about.

The survival game developed by EKO Software catapults us to an island with few survivors and many zombies, grappling with the primary needs of our character (hunger, thirst, fatigue), to be met cyclically, and the hope of staying alive in order to escape to a safe place, if it exists. During the exploratory phases we will be able to collect a large number of objects, blunt weapons and other more complex ones, to be built using an immediate but fairly deep crafting system. Moreover, paying attention to the phases of the day, since at night fearsome predators will emerge from everywhere and the only way we will have to catch them by surprise is to point the beam of light of a flashlight in their face ... provided that you have them of a charged battery. All by completing missions that will be assigned to us from time to time by the characters with whom we will have to do, and which mostly consist in identifying certain things or reaching places that are on the starting island or on others that belong to the same. archipelago: a knob could allow us to repair an old boat and remove the disturbance, just as responding to a distress call could plunge us into a nightmare even worse than the one we are experiencing.

This type of structure, not particularly varied, appears very close to that of the most famous action RPGs but remains simple in its mechanisms, since we will not have to take into account hit points, dexterity modifiers and so on. The growth of the character is completely linear and different from one survivor to another, assisted by a tree of skills that we can go in the direction we prefer, unlocking skills that perhaps have to do with survival or physical endurance, rather than with combat and precision. An interesting system, which, however, materializes in a way that is far from perfect: even if the Storm Warning Edition puts a patch on the technical shortcomings of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, thanks to 1080p and a stable frame rate, stylistic choices are often repetitive and devoid of personality. Added to this is a too basic combat system, characterized by a largely inaccurate collision detection, a poor impact yield and a command layout with a questionable configuration., as hitting an enemy by pressing a controller trigger is anything but natural. In short, the new edition of the game enriches the formula and optimizes where possible, but clearly does not revolutionize the experience.

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Tested version PlayStation 4 Digital Delivery PlayStation Store Price 19,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

7.0

Readers (11)

7.2

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How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition confirms the strengths and weaknesses of the EKO Software production, one year after the publication of the original version. The experience appears full-bodied, with some stimulus to replayability due to the differences between the characters and the presence of interesting extra modes compared to the campaign alone, although the action turns out to be in any case fairly repetitive and without sharp details. To create this situation is above all a basic and sketchy combat system, which does not render impacts well or accurately detect collisions, often giving rise to episodes of frustration due to damage that perhaps we should not have suffered. On the next-gen platforms, the technical problems that plagued the game on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are solved, but it would have been reasonable to expect something more.