Xera: Survival, as you may have guessed from the title, is an open world, multiplayer survival game. You run around performing typical survival tasks, like grabbing food and water so you don’t die, as well as finding guns, ammo, medical supplies, and other gear to help you fend off any violent threat waiting to end your life. In this game, that threat is robots, and of course, other players.
The game takes place in 2022, and apparently by then we’ve messed around with A.I. controlled robots a little too much. Some “warbots” became self-aware, and they’ve turned on us squishy humans. As a result, the entire nation has collapsed due to the mechanical threat. Now you and some other operatives in a militaristic organization are tasked with taking out these metallic foes, although it’s up to you whether you’ll stick to the mission, or run around capping other fools in the head and looting their belongings.
In terms of how the game works, you basically drop into the world and are told that you’re some kind of operative. There are also bases around that function as safe zones, where you can’t be attacked by robots or humans. Once you leave these bases, you’re on your own, and have to find a way to survive. You then run around and ransack surrounding houses and cities, gathering things into your inventory.
The game plays well enough; combat feels pretty good and aiming and shooting is responsive. The menu isn’t clunky, and there didn’t seem to be any frame rate hitches or game breaking bugs. Small praise, but for a survival game in early access that’s not a bad start.
The problem with Xera: Survival is that it doesn’t really do much to stand out from other games in the genre. It’s very obvious that it’s trying to be DayZ, and the comparisons are almost unavoidable. The only real difference is that instead of zombies, here it’s robots running amok, but they serve pretty much the same function.
And to be honest, the robot threat is not really all that threatening or intelligent. When a robot sees you, they kind of just jog towards you, leading you to either shoot it, bash it with a melee weapon, or run around a building until you manage to shake it off your trail. Once you’re encountered them, there’s really not anything scary about them. They’re not hard to beat, and they look kind of like the battle droids from the Star Wars prequels. There is one variety of robot that blows up, so you probably want to avoid that one, but other than that the robot threat is surprisingly manageable. It certainly doesn’t seem like they’re coordinated enough to take down an entire nation.
The real trouble comes from other players, which is how most survival games like this work. Much like DayZ, other people are much more deadly than any other enemy. I remember walking along minding my own business, before I was shot in the head by unknown assailants from the woods. I was then teabagged, called a scrub, and told to uninstall the game, which again, is kind of what you expect from games like these, so I did feel like I was getting the true survival game experience.
However, this didn’t happen all that often, as the game worlds were often pretty scarcely populated. I wandered around for a full 45 minutes in game before finally stumbling into the people who would murder me, and once I loaded in again, I didn’t see anyone else until I decided to head back to the safe zone. It could be a case where the game’s map is so large that everyone was scattered across different locations, but according to Steamspy, the game’s concurrent player peak yesterday was 273 people, which doesn’t seem like a whole heck of a lot.
The houses and towns you can rummage through are pretty threadbare. The interiors lack much detail, and most of the homes I broke into were just white spaces that occasionally had cans of cola or crowbars lying around. I remember finding a police station, and thinking to myself, “I bet there’s going to be some neat stuff in here.” There was a chalkboard with details about some kind of gas station thief, but aside from that, there wasn’t a whole lot inside other than some cans of soup and a football helmet. In fact, for a game about looting, there really didn’t seem to be a lot of cool things to actually loot.
The world itself is simply bland. Character models look like generic soldiers in balaclavas, the robots look goofy, and locations all tend to blur together after a while. The sound design is also pretty underwhelming, with the main ambient noises being random bird chirps, and a weird low humming sound that would pop up from time to time. I thought the humming sound may have been an indicator of robots nearby, but upon looking around I couldn’t find anything making the noise. Apparently the world of Xera just randomly drones on for a bit.
For a game to stand out in this overcrowded genre there needs to be some kind of hook, something that makes it special. Xera: Survival lacks that right now, as after playing it for a few hours, I couldn’t find any real reason to continue. If I wanted more of a game like this, I could easily just jump into DayZ, or play Rust, or any other survival game. As it stands, after a while with Xera, I was just kind of bored.
Thankfully this game is still in early access, so it’s not too late to make some changes. The basic mechanics of the game are sound, so all it needs is a little spice to really become worth playing. A little more detail in the world, some improvement to the robots’ design and animations, along with some original gameplay ideas and Xera could be a fine addition to the survival genre. There is potential here, but this robot apocalypse still needs some major work.
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