The Rule of Land: Pioneers Preview for Steam Early Access

Coronal mass eruption. No electrical devices. Risk to DNA mutations. The Rule of Land: Pioneers by publisher Gamera Game and developer HorgeeGames, an indie game studio, presents a 2-D Fallout-like world where you try to survive in a contest. After 50 years living underground due to coronal mass eruption, humans assume the surface is habitable again. To do that, they start a competition where each competitor tries to survive in their designated areas. 

As one of the competitors, you try to survive in the post-apocalyptic world by yourself and 4 other competitors. Before diving at the game, you must choose several starting conditions. At first you pick from five different survival spots: forest, city, swamps, mountains, and town. Each survival spot has 4 other unique areas which are necessary for your survival. After killing enough “robbers” in your area, you can visit other areas at night and it is critical for winning the competition. Then you are required to select a season to start with, note that each season lasts for 30 days and has different small implications in the game. Lastly you need to select a starting character. Each character has its own unique stats but requires you to survive specified days before unlocking them. 

Before you are allowed to freely wander in the game world, you are required to complete a tutorial, which introduces the basic mechanics like hunting, hiding, and interacting with objects for your survival. Once the game starts, you are alone at your camp, completely free to do whatever you want. At the beginning of each game you get a crate with food and ammo enough for your 10 days of survival. However, these surpluses do not last any longer than that and you need to build structures like furnace and workbench to advance.

Once you run out of anesthetic ammo, you can’t get intact hide from animals and it is crucial if you want to upgrade your bag, or most importantly to build a tent, so advancing is not an option. Right from the start of the game, you have three bars to keep an eye of: hunger/thirst, mental health, and body temperature. They don’t deplete quickly but they are hard to fill so make sure in your travels you collect everything there is to eat or sell to the traveler who visits you at your camp once in a while.

For each area, there are four other small areas you can visit. Every area has its own resources and wild animals. You wouldn’t want to confront a hyena without some ammunition so it is best to be prepared for your travels. You might also bring a crowbar with you if you are visiting an area for the first time, there are cars or boxes from which you can unlock and collect items.

As you travel, you come across log fragments which give tips about the game. They last between playthroughs so as you progress more in the game you can unlock more tips on how to survive longer in the wilds. Aside from the survival aspect of the game, the actual purpose of the game is winning the competition so you can outlive the other competitors or make sure they don’t have much resources to last. In order to dry their resources, first you need to kill “robbers” in your areas. You can see where they are at the map so you can plan your travels accordingly. When you confront them, they ask you to give you an item. You can obey or kill the robber. By killing the robbers, you can start to unlock other survival spots and travel there at night. The big twist of travelling to others’ areas is that you can visit their areas only at night, and if you are caught the other competitor confiscates your bag. You better be ready to hide behind something at any moment when you are in others’ territory!

What makes The Rule of Land: Pioneers unique is that the game is a 2-D survival game. There are games out there like Fallout series with great role-playing elements, The Forest with its intense combat, or Subnautica with great emphasis on exploration. Personally, I couldn’t see what this game brought to the table. It has great speedrunning potential, or you can challenge your friends to set a high score but other than that the gameplay feels a bit monotonous. In order to get resources, let’s say you are mining, you have to sit and wait the whole time. If there is a thunderstorm, you have to crouch all the time to not get thunderstruck, but by doing so, only your movement is slowed down. Even with such a penalty I didn’t feel challenged enough while playing the game. The designers might have done this on purpose for the Normal Mode and left the challenge to the other game modes but the game runs out of excitement before finishing it for the first time. Once in a while a random guy pops up in the camp to give you mini-quests with great rewards but even that feels unimportant, I wasn’t compelled to complete these quests.

The strategy component of the game dominates the gameplay of the game. Even the surprise element that comes with the randomness did not have any mentionable effect on me. If some mechanics are polished and some texts are fixed, I am not quite sure if it will be fun to play. At the end, it is a survival game in 2-D. Because the areas are so small there isn’t much exploration to do. After playing the game for a couple of hours, you start to get bored of the grind. Or the roleplaying element doesn’t even exist, making your experience dull. At the beginning of the game I looked forward to getting my hands on the horses that ran around on the map or using explosives to get access to a blocked area but that was it. There weren’t many long-term goals that made me want to keep playing. While I was keeping my eyes on long-term goals, the game introduced a companion system to protect your camp but it didn’t change how I played the game at all. 

Personally, I like the idea of a 2-D survival game, however, the game lacks something that shines out. The Rule of Land: Pioneers is a survival game but it doesn’t bring something new to the table other than being 2-D. If they introduced something only can be done in 2-D but not in 3-D, it would justify this game being in 2-D. With the introduction of 1-2 new mechanics and after polishing the existing mechanics the game might become very fun to play. 

Check Out The Rule of Land: Pioneers Steam Early Access Trailer: 

The Rule of Land: Pioneers is available for $10.99 via Steam Early Access.

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