Thanks to Ginormocorp Holdings Ltd for sending us a key to review.

Survivalist: Invisible Strain is the sequel to the previously released Survivalist title. It keeps the zombie survival and community building, but adds more of a focus on multiplayer elements. I was actually surprised when a copy of this game came in as a new release title since I had been seeing various streams of it for some years now. Seems it was released in Early Access about 5 years prior and had just recently hit full release.

Invisible Strain builds off of the foundation set up in the first game with you controlling a survivor in a zombie apocalypse scenario with the goal to build a sustainable community. The biggest change I saw while playing was how much this title seemed aimed for multiple players. When you load up a save it prompts you to set the server to private, open to friends, or public. Due to only getting a single copy of the game, and not having any friends who own it that I could ask to join me, I only interacted with the solo player offerings of the game.

Basically gameplay is somewhere between third person and an almost isometric perspective, but there is also a top down super zoomed out camera for some settlement management commands. In truth, the game almost feels more like a settlement management game than any sort of RPG game. While you do control a party of characters, you can give them assignments that they will try and complete on their own. They also tend to take care of most of their needs on their own. Even my own created character would drink, eat, and bandage themselves entirely without me telling them what to do. I am also unaware of a way to turn that off.

Invisible Strain, while having a story option, felt more designed as a sandbox with players creating their own world, with various different customization options such as amount of zombies and different human settlements, that one would open up to others and try to survive. The story that was presented in the hand crafted world was intriguing, but it was really structured as more of a tutorial. It seemed sort of interesting at first, but once I reached the point where it was having me claim a gas station as a home and being sent to talk to random survivors about a bald-headed guy who escaped a zombie attack, it kind of took a backseat.

The art style chosen is quite interesting. This series tries and stylizes itself in a comic book fashion, presumably based off of series such as the Walking Dead, but it leads to some areas looking cheesy and cheap. There is certainly a feel of Unity Engine indie title to some graphics, but all the different references to comic books and graphic novels is undeniable. There is a basic character creator that lets you design some different aspects of your character, but there’s a really detailed head section that feels out of place at first when you see what most of the gameplay is. That is until you see the upper corner of the screen is reserved for the head of whomever is having stuff happen to them to appear there and give you a text update. If this was just talking to NPCs this would feel very basic, but you also have this used for other members of your community to let you know what is happening such as getting jumped by zombies while hunting. There are other elements that also play into this art style, but I find the heads to be the most fitting area. It is even more interesting when you start playing it more as a settlement management game than an RPG. It’s neat getting those updates from your people.

Sound design was alright. The zombies sound good on the map and I found the ranged weapons to have a good umpf to them, but the background music was a bit distracting. It was as if there were 2 tracks, one being a very minimalistic music track while the other being more spooky ambiance, but the ambience also had some music in it and it just didn’t sound like it synced up well. I would have muted it, but I did like it alerting me if zombies saw me.

The controls are probably what gave me the most grief when playing. My best way to describe it is it felt like I was playing a controller only experience on mouse and keyboard, but it was made for mouse and keyboard. There was just a lot of time I spent in the options menu trying to tweak things to be even somewhat playable feeling and I never wound up achieving that. Granted, some of these issues would likely have gotten smoothed over by playing it longer, but I also knew that if I had personally bought this I would have returned it due to all the difficulty I was having. The most annoying was trying to do the melee combat and trying to aim my mouse up and down to target different parts of the body. You aren’t selecting a body part by aiming at it; you are literally moving the mouse up and down to change sections which I found obnoxious given the other things I was having to manage in the middle of combat. You also had to hold right click to bring out your weapon and then left click to be able to attack. All of that was on top of a dodge system that you had to do to avoid being grabbed by a zombie and infected. Looting structures and moving things amongst the inventories of your allies is another thing I found tedious and painful. I kept having to scroll between a lot of other options to get to the thing that I selected the most and kept wasting time selecting the wrong option. I didn’t notice any stability issues or bugs during my playtime.

Violence is fairly bad, but not overly gorey. I played mostly as a melee character so there was more violence with selecting different parts of the human body to beat down including when you managed to knock them onto the floor. You fight both humans as well as other survivors and raiders. Probably the most violent thing that happened to me was getting chewed to death by zombies. I didn’t notice any blood or guts, but you are fairly zoomed out throughout most of the game. Language is fairly bad. I saw up to an instance of a mother f-bomb. I didn’t notice any use of the Lord’s name in vain, but most of the dialogue during fights is easily missed. I didn’t encounter any sexual content, but there is an option to choose your character’s sexuality in the character creator, but I have no idea where this exactly leads to besides some different flirting options during dialogue. If you do remove all your clothes you are in some kind of under garment, though it isn’t really anything flattering. Nothing present is really supernatural aside from the zombies, which seem more of a scientific variety, and using crosses to save if you have free save turned off. The only problem with authority is some issues with FEMA in the tutorial, but that mostly stems from them trying to kill you to cover up some stuff. It is worth adding that this game functions mostly as a sandbox so you can choose to play this game as an evil and scummy person and raid the survivor settlements and try and kill everyone, but I personally never tried this route.

Overall I feel like Survivalist: Invisible Strain is a solid title, but I don’t feel like fighting with the controls in order to play more. Maybe if you had a group of four people and you did it all coop it would be a lot more enjoyable, but as a solo experience I just didn’t mess with it. That said, the game seems to have a decent modding scene with some really neat looking things on the Steam workshop so maybe they will one day add some stuff to it that will draw me back in.

- Paul Barnard (Betuor)