CryoFall review friv game - the future is not for everyone

The sci-fi survival simulator CryoFall is on its way to release, and we're ready to share our impressions of the online game from the developer Friv2Online Studio in a short but concise review.

We gamers know that appearances can be deceiving. As often as we found a completely faceless gut behind an attractive exterior, we often found real treasures behind an ugly picture.
I won't hide that for me, as a survival friv game lover, whose interest to AtomicTorch's work was fed by the abundance of positive reviews in Steam, landing on an unknown planet was unexpectedly tough. Not only because our visual style preferences were not in sync with those of the developers, but also because I dared to hope for a somewhat less measured gameplay.

CryoFall is an isometric MMO-survival game set in a world of distant future and space exploration. Colonization of habitable planets is actively promoted by four organizations: the Galactic Republic, the Alliance of Independent Worlds, the Outer Ring Protectorate and the Directorate.
They are supposed to have a small backstory, but it is not relevant - in the game the story is written by the "survivalists" themselves, and they are usually not interested in the origin and ideological views of their neighbors. Nevertheless, the choice of affiliation gives some advantages to your avatar during creation.
Republicans, for example, are hardy. They are better able to withstand hunger and thirst, and are farming savvy. Guys from independent worlds are excellent gatherers and fishermen. Those from the periphery are born miners and builders, while the supporters of the Directorate can survive in an aggressive environment. Each faction offers four bonuses for your hero.

The game will be played either on servers officially supported by the development team, or in the worlds of the community. The latter are much less stable, their holders are free to tinker with the friv game mechanics at their discretion, and custom modifications are available on them. The main feature that differentiates rilms, as usual, was their PvP or PvE orientation.
With PvP servers everything is standard. They are not badly populated, players on them gather in small communities and endlessly fight each other. More developed players turn the efforts of less developed players into cosmic dust, newcomers are annihilated without any unnecessary shouting, in short - senseless and merciless hardcore. But fun if you break into one of the formed guilds or with a group of reckless comrades.
It's noticeably quieter on the PvE reels. Even during prime time, most of them are not even half full (the situation may change after the release). But even this number of guests is enough to actively industrialize the planet and create a semblance of life on it.

When you are born, you fall on some plot of a rather modest, as it later turns out, map. Of course, you have no food, medicine or weapons. It is not difficult to find your friends - the world map is covered with the fog of war, but it is there. And it is immediately drawn into squares and coordinate points, and the friends added to the group are displayed on it with icons.
While you and your comrades are moving towards each other, looking for a place for the future camp, you will be forced to accept several specific circumstances related to CryoFall. First of all, during the long journey you will most likely not be eaten by alien monsters, you will not be killed by the climate, you will not get some kind of disease, even hunger and thirst will not be a problem - there is a lot of vegetation around, which quickly sprouts up, and predators are lazy and they quickly get bored with chasing the prey.
Secondly, you can't help but notice that CryoFall is not Don't Starve after all. No, unfortunately, there is no zest in its drawing, and animations are the bare minimum. And they cause persistent associations with old browser friv games. The appearance of the game very quickly cooled down the explorer in me, but it's all subjective, of course.

Another not the most pleasant, but quite expected circumstance, especially if you came to the server, where there have been no vypas for a long time, is that the world will be densely built up with houses of other inhabitants. No, not houses - bases. Huge, high-tech factories that guard the sleepless avatars of offline players. There are more than enough places where you can set up your own camp, but there will always be someone living in the neighborhood. Fog of War doesn't work here for some reason, and you can see everything that happens behind the high fences and locked doors of your neighbors.
CryoFall will keep newcomers busy with a very long chain of introductory quests, during which players will learn everything they need to know about the game, and their avatars will collect a huge amount of "Technology Points", necessary to learn new recipes in a special development tree.
The tree is very branchy and diverse. This is one of the advantages of CryoFall, which the developers can be justifiably proud of. There are five ranks of basic and specialized technologies in the game, each subsequent one opens access to more and more advanced items and buildings.

From basic fire building, basic farming, building a log cabin and smelting metals in a makeshift furnace, to flying vehicles, drones, mechs, cybernetic implants and energy weapons.
While basic technologies are useful for everyone, specialized ones can be crammed in selectively. Developers assume that in this way players will be able to distribute specializations within the community. One player will begin to study medicine, the second will be engaged in farming and cooking, the third - will become a gunsmith, and so on. And loners can simply trade with others, especially since the vending machine in the friv game can also be built.
Whatever you do, whether it's mining, hunting, logging, farming, you will, firstly, get technology points, and secondly, you will start gaining personal skills. For example, if you run long enough, your character will become more resilient and start gaining levels of athleticism, with each of which the sprint stamina consumption will decrease.

Having found a place to camp, you will soon establish your first "Control Point" as part of the training program and gradually, step by step, begin to form your own den around it. From there, everything will follow roughly the same looping pattern: resource extraction, construction, production.
It will be treacherously slow until the third or fourth rank, until you will not construct adequate weapons and good protective suits to start mopping up dangerous areas. With each new rank, farming will become increasingly difficult, forcing you to spend more and more time searching, mining, and crafting.

It is clear that most survival games have a similar basis, but our team on the PvE reel of this game all the way through was sorely lacking impressions. Despite the abundance of different biomes and life forms, the landscapes are not very diverse, and because of the specific graphics in the world of CryoFall there is almost nothing to catch your eye, which made me and my companions uninterested in exploring the world around us.
The building and farming processes in the game are extremely meditative. You endlessly swarm around machines, vegetable gardens, stoves, wander from one spot to another, your life is rarely threatened by anything, and instead of a shortage of resources you are bothered by an endless shortage of consumables, the materials for which are not difficult to obtain, but, as far as I am concerned, quite tedious.

Among the brightest features of CryoFall we would like to emphasize the system of effects, which developers of indie survival games often forget to develop. The hero can overdose on medicine or get drunk, he can get poisoned, overheat, get psychic injuries and even mutate - there are 15 kinds of debuffs in the game, and special skills and drugs are required to fight each of them.
The main drawback of CryoFall is the lack of automation. The friv game has robotics, electricity and a huge number of production units, which players have to maintain manually. CryoFall looks and plays as if it should have conveyors and CPUs, but for some reason they were not added.
Otherwise, it's very easy to get bogged down in the AtomicTorch project for dozens or even hundreds of hours. To find out for sure if the project meets your preferences, I strongly recommend downloading the demo version of CryoFall on Steam before buying it.
CryoFall is an undemanding multiplayer sandbox, but not so much a survival game as a mining and construction simulator with a well thought-out technology tree. If you came to it with your friends to "survive" - you are in the PVP-world, where you will have to fight for a place under the sun round the clock. If you are used to tough PVE-tests, you will probably get bored quickly.
The project is designed for the category of players who can enjoy the leisurely process of base development, or for groups of people who want to play the warlike colonizers, but it is definitely not suitable for those who like to explore unusual extraterrestrial worlds and defend their homes from alien monsters.