Turn Me On Unturned

This week I’m back to talk to you about a game that encompasses not one but two of my most common topics—it’s an early access game about zombies called Unturned. At first glance Unturned looks like someone's attempt at making a flash rip off of Minecraft. But if you look past the blocky graphics the gameplay is actually quite good. The game itself is stable and relatively bug-free, which if you compare it to most of its counterparts in the early access genre that’s saying quite a bit.

The game can also be played in a few different ways. There is a single player mode where you are a lone survivor traveling across an island inhabited by the zombified remains of residents and military personnel. Your goal is simple: survive, explore and salvage as much as you can. The concept may be simple but the game has no lack of items to discover and a plethora of weapons and crafting options giving it a lot of depth and replayability. You’d be surprised how much there is to find and discover. Once you establish a settlement of sorts, Unturned allows you to go on what I like to call salvage runs—essentially gassing up a car and driving around from town to town looking for new gear and weapons, while continuing to fight off hordes of zombies. It really makes you feel like a survivor. Add in the experience and leveling aspect of the game (which is used to increase your different traits: be it offensively, defensively or just survival skills in general) you’re slowly but surely becoming more attuned to your environment, which is what a real survivor would over time. And that's all just the single player aspect.

In multiplayer there are a few differences, the most important of which being PVP. Now for the uninitiated that's player-versus-player and there's a certain change in feel when you start playing PVP which is the same in every zombie movie and game...other people are dicks. The game goes from you versus the world, to you versus the world and everyone else in it. That's a huge jump in difficulty because other players are better equipped and a lot smarter than your run of the mill zombie, then add in the fact that you drop whatever it is you're carrying on death puts a big target on your head, which leads to some shaky alliances and gangs of "pre-mades" running around tearing up the place.

The last game type is arena mode, which is kind of a survival multiplayer that's zombie free but just as dangerous. There's not much to say about it, it’s a kill or be killed world out there and it’s basically a mad grab for weapons and gear; it’s fun and can get pretty exciting but it speaks for itself.

As I said, Unturned is still in development but it’s fairly polished at this state and as you’ve seen, I’ve been enjoying it thoroughly and there's no reason you shouldn’t get this game because it won’t cost you a cent. If you feel like you absolutely need to pay money for this game or you just want to support the developers, you can pay five dollars for the gold edition of the game which gives you a bunch of in-game boosts and items including: better loot drops, exp boosts and access to gold servers which have better ping and are more stable than most. I’m not gonna tell you to go out and buy this game, because you don't need to buy it, just go download it and give it a try, it’s not gonna cost you a thing and you’ll probably end up liking it. I downloaded this game on a whim after watching some gameplay footage and it hasn’t disappointed me yet. So if you’ve got some free time, give it a try and hopefully you won’t shoot me in the head on some random server.