Genre fans will no doubt find their account, others may prefer more established licenses.

The vast majority of the game is an extremely engaging and rewarding survival game that is made only more fun when you have friends to jump into a server with. Advancing through the research trees and advancing from merely surviving in the wasteland to comfortably living in it is a great experience, and is one that CryoFall offers players in a unique way.

Cryofall Review Header Developer AtomicTorch Studio's CryoFall is a top-down multiplayer survival game that spent nearly two years in Steam's Early Access program. Much like genre titan Rust, it takes learning a lot of different tricks and strategies to survive in CryoFall. The early hours of a game in CryoFall are stressful and jam-packed with things to do, but as time goes on the game begins to drag and the small amount of content available quickly runs out. CryoFall is set on a hostile alien world that sports a top-down 2D aesthetic that is reminiscent of the style of Don't Starve. Like most survival games, the player will need to wander the world collecting different kinds of resources like wood, stone, and ore in order to craft machines or tools to help them more efficiently collect those resources. On top of this hunger and thirst must be managed by finding reliable sources of both food and water, which can prove to be nail-bitingly hard due to the hostile creatures that roam the planet. Related: Survival Game Icarus Sets Up Harsh World In Live-Action Trailer One of the more interesting aspects of CryoFall is that it has a progression system that allows technology to be researched in multiple different categories. By completing tasks like mining rocks or cutting down trees Learning Points are earned. These points can then be spent in the Technology tab to acquire advances in technology. Depending on what survival methods the player wants to focus on will determine what technologies they should research. Those who are interested in working with food items can put some points into the Cooking and Farming sections, whereas those who are trying to explore the world should research Offense and Defense to craft some of CryoFall's best weapons. This gives a decent amount of control over how the game is played. Cryofall How to Get Food and Water To help acquire Learning Points, CryoFall also employs both a quest and achievement system. Quests are special tasks that reward a certain number of Learning Points when completed. These tasks range from simple ones like visiting a specific part of the map or more complicated ones like killing five kinds of animals in the world. Achievements on the other hand award the player points whenever they obtain a new item, like by discovering one of CryoFall's types of food. Each new item can be redeemed in the menu for ten Learning Points apiece and can then be spent however the player wishes. These give concrete goals to focus on in the early hours of CryoFall, which helps considerably with progression. One thing that does set CryoFall apart from other online survival games is that there are two different game modes. While there is no single-player mode at this time, overly aggressive users can be avoided by joining a PvE server rather than PvP. In PvE, people won't be able to harm each other and can't steal or damage property that doesn't belong to them. This makes for a perfect learning environment for those who want to get used to the game and its mechanics without getting murdered by griefers constantly. PvE is similar to Rust's Softcore mode, but it makes things even easier for newcomers to get adjusted by removing the threat of others entirely. Cryofall Technology Tiers The main issue with CryoFall is that once a few hours have been spent with it, things begin to drag. After completing the first section of technologies, progression slows down to a snail's pace and there rarely feels like there is much reason to invest in many of the technologies that are being unlocked. After ten hours or so with the game a point will be reached where there are no more quests to complete or goals to pursue. Progression becomes overly grindy for some of CryoFall's technology tiers like Electricity without any quests, which feels intentional to cover for the fact that there isn't much in the way of content to explore. Upon reaching the halfway point of Technology, there feels like little reason to keep playing. CryoFall doesn't feel like a 1.0 release, but rather a title that just now landed in Early Access. While the survival mechanics and progression systems are well designed, there isn't enough content to justify spending a lot of time with the game. Hardcore survival fans that are looking to explore a new world with mechanics that feel familiar will probably have some fun with CryoFall, but most will be better off playing a more popular title with the same central conceits.