Hurtworld – First Impressions

There are plenty of survival games knocking around at the moment and the trend for them doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Personally this doesn’t bother me, I love a survival game.

Hurtworld from Bankroll Studios is the latest game to embrace the genre with open arms, but how does it stack up?

I’ve not put too many hours in to Hurtworld, which hit Steam early access a couple of weeks back, but I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of what the game has to offer.

You start life off on the edge of a rocky desert wasteland with nothing but a pair of shorts/pants on. The first thing you’ll notice is the Team Fortress 2 style visuals – I think it suits it down to a tee, it looks great.

Time to start gathering! You can pick up small logs and rocks scattered around on the ground, eventually you’ll be able to craft a small number of items like an axe and a spear, now you can hunt and gather on a larger scale. You keep on going like this until you can build yourself a work bench and assemble an arsenal of weapons and tools to make you a ‘real’ survivor. It’s pretty much as you’d expect, gather, build, gather, upgrade…

The one thing I quite like about Hurtworld is that all players start off in a similar area, so the chances on you bumping in to someone early on are pretty high – this can also make it a little easier if you’re trying to meet up with friends.

However it does have a down side as obviously some people just want to watch the world burn and will kill on sight. Thankfully unless they’re a crack shot with the bow or spear your chances are survival are pretty good if you just turn and run.

Another great aspect of Hurtworld is that you actually have to try and survive the nights. Early on, if you don’t have much clothing you can easily freeze to death at night. So building a fire and finding some shelter is essential if you want your adventures to continue for a long time.

Eventually you might want to start building yourself a home. First you need to build a construction hammer, then you’ll gain access to the crafting menu and you can basically build to your hearts content provided you have the materials.

I myself started to build a small home – mainly so I could respawn at a totem set in it if I died and also so I could store some materials.

It was simple home, a 2×2 one story building. The problem was, was that I ran out of materials whilst building so I couldn’t construct a roof. This made me a prime target for a raid. As I expected people would regularly appear trying to get in and I would have to defend myself from within. Luckily you can stake claim to land and this means that anything you build on it is yours – including a door to your house, meaning no one else can get it.

I was able to defend my home whilst I was there – it was pretty easy really, I just stood inside with my bow out waiting for anyone trying to jump in. But as soon as I left to gather materials it was very vulnerable and upon returning it was gone… A passer-by – and someone I’d been chatting with, informed me that a group had managed to jump in and demolish it…. Oh well, lesson learned.

My experiences with Hurtworld have kind of ended there. But I have explored a little further and found a lizard-y creature that spits poison, a radiated dome building that will kill you if you linger too long. There are also Yeti’s when you heard further North to the snow land.

There is still a lot for me to discover in Hurtworld including vehicles, firearms and more advanced building. There are also other survival elements you need to be wary of – heatstroke in sandstorms, rain, heatstroke from being too close to a fire.  From what I’ve played so far I really like it plus it’s selling well on steam right now which makes the game very active. So let’s hope that the developers continue with the great work that they’ve already done – not that I think they won’t, as this could turn out to be a great survival game.

-Will