Wednesday, 27 February 2019 05:12

Project Winter Early Access Review

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Edited by: Tiffany Lillie

DESPERATION AND DECEPTION

One of the best aspects of Project Winter is its ability to create tension. At the start of each match, you’re randomly chosen to either be a survivor or a traitor. Survivors are tasked with repairing the Comms Stations, Radio Beacons, Helipads, and calling for help, whereas the traitors are tasked with sabotaging the survivors’ chances of escape by any means necessary — including murder. The implementation of the traitor system keeps you perpetually on your toes, wary of all your fellow players, and adds a nice level of tension to each round.

The tension doesn’t stop with the traitors either. Blizzards will break out across the map, freezing you to an easy to death if you can’t find warmth. Starvation is a real enemy, slowly dragging your health down until you can find food. The worst offenders, though, are the animals. Brutish bears and ravenous wolves can kill you in a matter of hits, constantly keeping you on the lookout as you search the wilderness for objectives to complete. All of these aspects help to make you truly feel as if you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, desperate to survive.

REAP THE REWARDS

Escaping the wilderness or successfully stopping the others from escaping takes enough work to feel like a hard-earned achievement, but the rewards don’t stop there. Each match gives you survival points depending on how well you did, such as for how many survivors were saved or how many crates were opened. These points can be used to unlock drop boxes or achievement rewards, which grant your player unique clothing items and accessories. Customizing your character is a must in order to stand out among the other players, and the survival points allow you countless options and a nice incentive to keep playing.

LOAD TIMES

As addictively fun as it is to fight the elements and guess who the traitors are, it can take a long time to get enough players for the matches to load. Some matches can take over ten minutes to find enough players to start, and the ones that do have enough participants can often be bogged down by players exiting and reentering the lobby or not hitting the ready button. I also ran into several issues where some matches would load and immediately disconnect everyone from the server, or end up kicking out everyone halfway through the round.

GLITCHES GET YOU KILLED

In such a high-stakes environment, every second counts and the current glitches can quickly get you killed. Some matches will load perfectly fine and everything will work great, but others might suffer from a variety of issues. One of the most detrimental glitches I found is sometimes when pressing the WASD keys to walk, your character will get stuck walking in a circle for a few seconds and you cannot move forward, making running away from bears and traitors almost impossible. I also ran into a bug where none of the players could repair the radio beacon, making the main goal of escape impossible to achieve and effectively ruining the round. Coupled with randomly being disconnected from the server, these glitches can be a severe hindrance on gameplay.

While not necessarily a glitch, it is also frustrating having to spectate the game as a ghost until the end of the match to see the end statistics. You can see your earned survival points and exit the match as a ghost at any time, but in order to see who the traitors were, how your fellow survivors fared, or who came out on top and scored the most points, you have to remain spectating until the end, which can take well over fifteen minutes if you died early on. Though this is not game-breaking by any means, it would definitely be beneficial to have an option to see past game statistics instead of waiting around for the one chance to see them.

5

The Verdict: Fair

A fun, high-stakes survival game, Project Winter delivers on a unique multiplayer experience but suffers from long load times and several frustrating glitches. With the title in the beginning stages of Early Access and many updates and patches in its future, Project Winter definitely has the potential to improve before the official release and is worth checking out if you’re a fan of the multiplayer survival genre.

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Jade Swann

Jade Swann is an avid video game player and fiction writer. She loves getting lost in open-world RPG’s, making tough choices in story-driven games, and is a big fan of the horror genre. Some of her favorite games include Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Planet Coaster, and The Sims 4. When not immersed in the world of video games, she can be found reading, writing, or spending time with her very lazy Boston Terrier.

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