6/1/2017, By: David 64 – Impact Winter follows the story of five survivors in the wake of a devastating meteor impact with Earth. Surviving this however was only the first step, as the resulting fallout has left the world buried in snow amidst a seemingly unending Winter.
You play as Jacob Solomon, the de-facto leader of the group barely scraping by in the ruins of an old church. As the game begins you receive word that help is coming in 30 days. You must try and make it with your four fellow survivors until then.
This is perhaps the first hint that Impact Winter is trying to set itself apart from the steady string of survival games we have seen over the past few years. Death is not inevitable, nor is endlessly building a bigger and better base your only direction. The 30 Day timer gives you a clear goal and in many ways it becomes a game of rationing your time and energy, and the risk vs reward of decisions you have to make, than just your standard survival chores. Helping strangers, keeping morale up and other tasks can also reward you with Rescue points, which reduce the 30 Day rescue timer, making some riskier situations all the more enticing.
As well as managing your time, you do of course have to manage some standard survival stats. The survivors each have their own Energy, Warmth, Hunger, Thirst and morale meters which must be carefully cared for to stand a chance of making it the 30 days. Each of the four survivors can also offer missions that can help the camp in different ways – such as improving your home base, cooking meals to stretch your food as far as it will go, improving your helper robot to find more valuable supplies or developing campsites and animal traps to help you venture further from your home base. These missions also offer a lot of insight into the personalities of the different survivors. Everyone has their own story of their life before the Impact, what they lost, and what still keeps them going. Time being perhaps your most precious resource however, it’s unlikely you will have enough to follow everyone’s quest line in one playthrough. Which adds some replayability.
When you’re not getting to know your fellow survivors and building up your base, you will find yourself wandering ‘The Void’ – The snow buried outside world – in search of supplies. Which are surprisingly abundant. Fuel, food and water are in good supply (At first at least), and your survivors can really help stretch them out by developing more efficient ways to use them. This may sound a little easy, but really it just shows how important efficiency is to the game. You’re on a clock. It’s not just about immediate survival, it’s about planning, preparing and really thinking about what you will need to get you to that 30 day finish line. Supplies may be plentiful right now, but what can you do now to prepare for when they’re not? Maybe you make a mental note of an item’s location for later rather than using valuable inventory space right now. Or maybe rather than gambling on scavenging The Void, you spend your time honing your hunting skills. It’s always a decision of the best use of your time and energy.
On the technical side of things, the PC version of the game got off to something of a bumpy start. Players were plagued by long load times, confusing button mappings, a lack of mouse support and just generally poor PC optimisation overall. Many of these issues have however since been fixed in a patch, with the developers promising further improvements coming soon.
If you can get passed some technical issues, Impact Winter feels like something of a breath of fresh air for the survival genre. More optimistic and purposeful than most, it’s just different enough to offer a new experience to fans of the survival genre without being different enough to alienate them. Preparedness and efficiency are key. And seeing how your actions early in the game impact the difficulty later on, along with the multiple questlines to pursue, means there will be plenty of reasons to start back at Day 30 and test your mettle all over again.