YonanThe pithy TL;DR is – it’s 3D Rimworld, just get it. It’s impossible to not get value for money in Stranded: Alien Dawn if you enjoy colony sims. But to elaborate on that…
Stranded: Alien Dawn is a 3D survival colony sim that really is Rimworld but in 3D. That might sound trite but it’s not – Rimworld is an amazing game with basically the single flaw being its graphics. The more limited graphical style of Rimworld makes it easier to create more content and deeper systems, but there’s no denying how immersive a beautiful world can be, so if you can have the same depth of gameplay as in Rimworld but within a beautiful 3d world you’re looking at GotY territory. Stranded does lose some depth however sadly, but it remains a very fun – and beautiful – game that quickly became a “one more day” time vampire.
It is created by Bulgarian developer Haemimont Games who are known for multiple great games since their first release in 2000 of Tzar: The Burden of the Crown including most recently Surviving Mars, of which my father and I sunk close to a thousand hours between us. Soon we will also see the return of a beloved series with Jagged Alliance 3, but also a solid history of well-received games including Omerta, Tropico 3, 4, 5, and a personal aRPG favourite for a couple of us, Victor Vran. Publisher Frontier Foundry, who hit the scene recently, has had a couple of good games under their belt already including the recently reviewed titles The Great War: Western Front, and Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters. A track history of success from both developer and publisher like this, combined with the fast and patch-filled early access, bodes well for the future of the game which when asking for someone to part with their money, is comforting to see.
If you’ve played colony sims before, you know the basics. You start with a random selection of characters with a variety of skills and traits, crash on a planet and then have to survive by collecting resources, building a base and killing anything that tries to kill you. To do this you will need to research things to build and craft, equip your survivors, skill them up and work around their flaws and utilize their strengths if you don’t want to have to start digging more graves than you’d like. So far so normal, and Stranded: Alien Dawn performs admirably at the basics of the genre – but there’s a lot more to it that’s worth digging into.
The options menu is excellent with everything you’d expect from a solid game: Borderless windowed mode, unlimited (or your choice of fps caps), toggleable vsync, ui scaling and about 20 graphical settings to tailor the performance and quality to your preference. Keys are rebindable and each action can be bound to two keys which is always nice and the general QoL features like camera sensitivity, inverted controls, and measurement units are more numerous than normal which is much appreciated. The performance has been great with over 100 fps on max settings at 1440 and over 70 fps at 4K. Our previous article on the game goes into the most recent update alongside the 1.0 launch and the update history through early access which was a nice series of large feature-rich content additions alongside tweaks and improvements.
True to the Formula
Stranded: Alien Dawn is true to much of the formula established by games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress before it – when it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Rimworlds iteration on Dwarf Fortress and the amazing modding community iterating upon that has set a solid base for colony survival sims to work from. Getting these fundamentals right however is still important and Stranded does a good job of this.
Skills and Traits are the core of each survivor, both in how effective they are and how you distinguish them from one another. Your guy that is an amazing craftsman but refuses to fight, even when bugs are eating his face, is easy to distinguish from the bruiser that loves to fight and is great at salvaging and chopping wood… but his cyborg implant gives him migraines that cripple him sporadically. These traits and skills are nice to see impacting the social lives of the survivors, as said bruiser regularly intimidates other members of the colony, and it’s always great to see them congratulating each other on their good harvest or skill improvements.
The core gameplay loop centres around resource gathering and then putting them to use. Some of these resources regenerate, but you usually need to do that yourself – you’ll need to plant your own fields of trees and alien plants to ensure you get enough of their resources, especially without wasting time running far from your base. Stockpile management is a thing as usual and likewise as usual is both fun and frustrating as you try to optimise it and hoard enough resources for a rainy day – literally and figuratively. Some of the alien critters can be tamed which is always fun and a good way to generate more resources and even protection for your base.
Survival is the goal, or challenge of the game. You start with some survivors and can find more, and you need to keep them alive against an unknown and hostile world. The fauna is a large part of this, but the world itself and primarily the temperature – both hot and cold – is a large part of the struggle depending on where you’re playing. While there are no bandits to attack you, there are swarms of bugs, and you’ll need to fight off waves of these occasionally. There are also hives on the map you can challenge if you feel up to it. The more constant struggle however is food and temperature. Building better-insulated buildings and clothes suitable for the season – which wear out of course – requires a lot of resources, and the mood boost from a variety of good food helps a lot. In saying that, you’d think in a survival situation a vegetarian might be looser in their consumption, but gameplay challenges are important!
Building your base is a lot of fun and you have a lot of ways you can go about it. The materials you use matters, both in what’s available and in what’s best for your needs. Then there’s where to build. Is it worth a trek across the map to be closer to resources or further from danger? Then there’s base layout where you can go for dormitories, single large rooms, multiple detached buildings and so on. After that is defences which matter a lot as you’re always going to be outnumbered and increasingly so over time – you need to implement the time-honoured tradition of a killbox if you want to survive the tougher stuff. Walls, towers that extend range and protect the survivors, defence turrets and traps, there’s a lot to play with here and that’s before we start talking about mechs!
Changes to the Formula
The primary change Stranded: Alien Dawn brings is the beautiful 3D world which, when you consider the ASCII origins of Dwarf Fortress and even the more recent attempts still being top-down sprites, is a radical change of pace and brings something new, unique, and awesome to the genre. Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld are renowned as story generators which is impressive given how little you can actually see the action in those games. In Stranded you can see your survivor running as fast as they can towards your base with a swarm of insects behind them, or you can catch the moment one was struck by lightning while working out in a rainstorm. It’s much more immersive and while I applauded Clanfolk for this recently, it’s even more true here.
It’s not just the world being in 3D however – if the graphics were Minecraft level it would still be nice but not as impactful as it is. The graphics are great, from the flurries of snow and snow-covered landscape that your survivors leave footprints in winter, the lengthening of the shadows of your fortifications as dusk approaches, or the quiet darkness of night where one survivor is working by torchlight to research electricity while the others sleep, it’s all very visually appealing. The sound design is worth mentioning here too because it fits in well with the beautifully realized world. The soft music and ambient noise make the world a pleasure to play in, and the distant ring of wood chopping or the screeching of insects in the middle of battle all sound great, as do the crisp interface sounds.
The alien world is actually alien, it’s not just “Earth with a different name”. When your survivors land there, they need to observe the local environment to see what it is, what it can do, whether it’s dangerous, and what they can use it for. While I wish this system had more randomness to it (think No Mans Sky), it does feel limited when each game in the same biome, you research the same things each time. It’s *good*, it’s just not great. There are currently two biomes so that helps, but hopefully, this is expanded later either through patching, DLC, or mods.
In a system reminiscent of Frost Punk, there is a system of exploration where you can send a balloon out to explore or accomplish certain random missions. It’s not a huge part of the gameplay but it does add a little extra variety which is nice. The map you play on feels much larger than Rimworld or Clanfolk, but unlike Rimworld you can’t go to new areas, so the expeditions help make the world feel larger.
The Bad
One glaring problem – from a player’s perspective – is the addition of Denuvo. While it’s understandable that developers need to protect their games, there’s no denying this can cause large problems for users. Performance did not seem to be negatively impacted for me with smooth and high FPS, especially when compared to the extent of the problems in some other controversial releases. A possible problem is also that there is probably some restriction of modding capability due to the nature of “anti-tamper” software. There are already mods on steam workshop for the game so hopefully it won’t have too much of an impact, and hopefully sometime after releasing it will get removed but that’s not something to bet on if this is a problem for you.
The enemy types you can fight are limited basically to a variety of insects. Killing giant bugs is cool but sentient enemies bring a lot more options to the table so it’s sad to not see them in game yet – a problem I also had with Clanfolk. It’s hard to call this a flaw however in the case of either game, but it’s worth pointing out in case it was expected.
The primary problem I had with the game doesn’t ruin the game totally, but it’s definitely something I hope is improved over time. It seems to be a combination of balancing and survivor AI/priorities where they end up acting very suboptimal, making you want to micromanage them far more than you should need to. Your survivors have a number of needs to be filled including hunger, rest and relaxation, and even when scheduled enough time to do these, they can drop what they’re doing across the map to run home to eat lunch when they’re still at 60% satiety. There are options to help address this such as “don’t require table” and “don’t require bed” when far from home, but they lead to large mood penalties instead, as you never want to commit the war crime of “eating without a table”. There’s killing someone, sewing their skin into a hat and wearing it, and then there’s forcing someone to eat without a table, you just shouldn’t sink so low.
I mentioned earlier that the repetition of alien things to research was not ideal, and that is definitely something that holds the game back, alongside there only being two biomes, no human enemies, and not enough things to build. When I say “not enough” however, it’s more that it won’t be enough to hold you for as long as Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld would. The game is still great without these, but they would help turn it into a timeless classic where people basically begged Tynan, the developer of Rimworld, to release DLC they could buy, just as people did with the release of Dwarf Fortress on Steam this year.
There was a good history of updates for the game in early access but there is no roadmap for the game going forward. Developer Haemimont Games has a good history of creating more content for their games via DLC. They have stated recently, “We’ll be releasing a free update later this summer, and while we will have to wait to share the finer details with you, we can say that it’s quite beefy (or maybe “leafy” would be a better term?). We will have more to share at a later date, so keep your eyes peeled to our various channels for any and all news related to the game.”
Stranded: Alien Dawn is a game I have no qualms recommending to all. It doesn’t rival Rimworld for depth, let alone Dwarf Fortress, but there is enough that when combined with its smooth gameplay and beautifully realized 3d alien world it remains a worthwhile and very enjoyable experience for veterans of the genre. New players should find the 3d world easier to acclimatize to and they won’t be overloaded with game mechanics so it would also make a good starting point for them. As-is I don’t think it will unseat Rimworld as king of the genre but with some patching and DLC down the line that is actually possible, the foundation is that solid. There’s easily enough content here to justify the far below AAA asking price and my quibbles mostly boil down to “it looks like it wouldn’t take much to make it game of the year”, not “this is a bad game”. It’s definitely worth your time, and your money. I hope the game succeeds (Steam reviews being very positive bode well here), I’ll happily buy DLC for years to come for a game with this much potential as a time vampire.
This review utilised a key provided by Heaven Media and Stranded: Alien Dawn is available now on Steam.
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Chris Inglis
