The Dead Linger (PC) – First Impressions
Sandswept Studios presents ‘The Dead Linger’! A First-person Zombie Survival game. ‘Early Access’ stereotypes apply here, folks (barely runs, riddled with glitches), but does this new entrant to a rather crowded market throw up some tantalizing glimpses of a great game to come?
I was given this game to review almost three months ago when it first came out on Steam back in late September. For the next three to four months, this game didn’t work on my system. I understand that it is still in an early-alpha form, but the developers should have waited until the game was stable before letting the public play. This game has only become playable within the last two weeks since their major ‘Into the Woods’ update, and I can now say that the game is in a ‘first impressions’ state.
All of what you’ve no doubt come to expect from a survival title is present in ‘TDL’. A vast open world for you to explore, a loot based progression system, barricadable buildings, online capability so you can survive with, or against friends, and a simple overall objective of seeing how long you can survive.
What sets ‘TDL’ apart from its competitors however, is that the world that you play in is 100% procedurally generated. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a great idea to include procedurally generated worlds in a game like this as it will always mean that each new world you make will be fresh, however the seed generation still needs a lot of work. For example, one of the brand-new buildings added in a recent patch is a supermarket, but every time I’ve found one in a world, the plot of the building has been too big for the ground that it’s generated on.
Yeah, I’m sure that’s not meant to be like that.
You also get flat,empty, landscapes, roads that lead to nothingness, floating buildings, and floating trees, but these are all things that will no doubt get corrected over time.The game still stutters, but the FPS has increased dramatically over the last few weeks. When I first tried playing, my FPS was in the single figures, now it’s more in the 30-40 range.
The new patch also added dense woodland into the game, graphically it looks pretty good when you’re out in the wilderness, even in its alpha stage. Most of the game’s textures are still pretty basic and rather ‘placeholder’ in nature, and the shaders are all nice and blocky, but this is what you would expect from a game that hasn’t been optimised yet.
Ignoring the whole ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ thing, I think I could live out here 😀
Alpha hiccups aside, your first objective in-game is to find yourself some food, some equipment (weapons, clothes, etc), and a place to call home. There’s not really much more for you to do after that, but the core game is there. There’s also not that much variety within the loot that you’ll be finding, but again this is always getting added to and we’re very early in development right now.
Another cool feature of the game is its physics-based reinforcing/building system. I will say that, right now, it really does not work properly and it’s damn-hard and time consuming to barricade even a single window, let alone an entire house, but again, the core aspect is there. You make planks of wood by cutting down trees with an axe (which can be rather hard to find), then in the crafting menu, simply dragging your logs into the crafting box strips them down to 2×4’s. The tricky part is getting said 2×4’s in a suitable position to be able to call them ‘barricades’, and you quite often end up with random planks sticking out of the wall.
Health and Safety would have a field day!
Probably the most important part of any zombie survival game is… the zombies! ‘TDL’s zombies, like most things in this game, are pretty ‘placeholder’. It seems as though the world that the zombie apocalypse befell was prior only inhabited by male skin-head metal fans.
Woo, mosh pitt!
They’re also not really that dangerous, which for a flesh-eating personification of the harbinger of the end of human civilisation as we know it, seems a little disappointing. You can sidestep and simply ignore vast swathes of them when they’re found outside. When you find them inside a building however, the cramped spaces coupled with the fact that if you don’t have a gun they’re rather hard to kill, can spell the end for you. But then again, I’ve found far more guns and bullets than I have food; starvation is honestly my most common cause of death!
That, and falling out of the sky…
… due to my magic hover board failing me! D:< (I repeat, there are A LOT of bugs)
Yes, this game is in really early development. Yes, it doesn’t really look that good right now as it’s full of placeholder models. Yes, every time I’ve loaded the multiplayer I take two steps then are greeted by my desktop. Yes, the loot tables are not balanced. Yes, the core aspects of the game are in their infancy…. But ultimately, I quite enjoy this game. I can see where it’s going and I hope, with the continual attention and support from a very strong and vocal community and studio, that in the coming months, we should have a proper game here.
I’ll be doing more reviews of this game as each major update is rolled out, so keep your eyes peeled to Voletic’s Facebook and Twitter for more info!
TL;DR So far, so good!