This time, we’re diving into Floodland, a world set after a cataclysmic event in which several tribes of your choosing start anew and build a sustainable lifestyle for themselves in order to survive a broken world.
This will be a different kind of review as we get quite a bit into the details of the game but knowing ya boy, it already is. Now, let’s start with the game’s info.
Developed by Vile Monarch and published by Ravenscourt, Floodland seems to be quite a good survival simulator that puts you in charge of a team and ensures their survival as more and more problems arise such as water and food aside from finding materials to construct possible living areas, storage and other facilities to build such as sorting stations, fish pens and water stills aside from kitchens to provide food to your troop of survivors.
You get to pick between four groups of survivors such as the Good Neighbours, Oakhill Survivors, Fire Brigade, and Berkut-3, each with their own pros and cons concerning all aspects of gameplay, from garbage management to food management and shelters, construction, and deconstruction. With this playthrough, I decided to go with the Fire Brigade by instinct.
Next, we dive into the music. It’s dark and somber but has small smatterings of hope you can hear in it, giving you a nice listen-to while working with the survivors be it getting food, gathering herbs or junk, or even scavenging whatever nearby ruin might be, as it might hold some supplies like fish or wood or others that might come in handy in the nearby future or far down on your playthrough, whose upgrades give you more output which means your water supply gets wetter, your fish pile gets fishier and your veggies a lot veggier.
When starting out and learning new tech to survive, the points system might be starting out really slow, but as you build the necessary structure needed to turn found books into said points, it’s just a matter of waiting for one or more to come by while managing the rest of your settlement as you find more people, get more structures. keep getting better, and growing, stretching into various districts, having their own specialties and delegated purposes.
The demo gave me a run that lasted around an hour or so, but it was a meaningful time that gave me enough to work with but had some left out there to keep things interesting and might just be enough to get me to purchase it, give it the same treatment I give Wild Guns or Ninja Warriors and play it well every other time I get to it whenever I do get to it.
Overall, Floodland is an interesting challenge that seems to be shaping up into something quite great. The challenge of building a city from whatever scrap you could collect, foraging for food and clean water, addressing problems as they arise, and keeping your followers content, happy, and most of all busy as you strive to rebuild civilization from rock bottom might be a really fulfilling and fun time sink for you, dear reader, then this game is a worthy addition for your Steam library.
Floodland releases on PC (via Steam) on November 15th, 2022.
