Triton Survival is a game that’s impressive and aggravating–it is bursting at the seams with ambition and potential, however its structural integrity is far from achieving those goals. It’s a teasing experience from developers DreamsSoftGames promising grandeur just beyond available reach.
At its heart, Triton Survival (as the title may suggest) is a sci-fi, survival RPG laced together through fort-building, exploration, resource management, and crafting. Your duty is to save the Earth from invading alien hordes by protecting an interplanetary portal with locally sourced crafting materials. Repelling the aliens serves as an intense and cathartic release while providing a shift tempo gameplay tempo.
While releasing games in their alpha-states is becoming more the norm, it has likewise become harder to characterize the long-term playability of games like Triton Survival upon their Steam releases. And it’s hard to advocate spending money on early access games as opposed to fully developed ones.
The game as it stands needs a ton of work. There is a big vision struggling to be executed and it will take time for it work as intended. For a game still in its alpha state, however, there is a certain magic waiting to be unearthed in Triton Survival.
Finding new materials, discovering unexplored vistas, and terraforming planets to your defensive purposes are enough carrots-and-sticks to begin with, but on top of that, there is ambition for:
- Base networks across Neptune’s planetary system
- A crafting system ranging from formulas for Water (H2O) to Morphine (C17H19NO3)
- Sandbox base-building with tower defense mechanics
- Automation centers for minerals and food
- Electrical grids
- RPG progressions for different professions, tech trees, and fighting abilities
- Unique monsters and horde-wave mechanics
- Vehicles for fast-travelling and combat
- And survival engines consisting of food, water, rocket fuel, stamina, health, shields, radiation, and ammo
all balanced on a co-op friendly basis.
While it may seem in the alpha there are too many cooks in the kitchen, I believe through the crucible of alpha and beta testing that Triton Survival can become a cohesive experience.
For instance, when I first became self-sufficient in maintaining a homeostasis of my survival loops, I felt a eureka moment, reinvigorating my drive to explore and expand–a great sign of different gameplay mechanics feeding into each other.
But those are big words considering the game-breaking bugs I experienced within the first 30 minutes of gameplay. An exploration game demands crisp control of your Player Character (PC) and a world that is childproofed against movement dead zones. It also necessitates a fluid response system for resource harvesting. Neither of those are accomplished yet, and it’s discouraging to lose all progress having to restart after getting stuck.
Similarly, the crafting menus and queue system for making multiple things at once barely work on a micro-scale, so I’d imagine the larger automated systems need polish as well. The inventory also needs to be integrated with the action bar.
These mechanics can be shored up, but praise for Triton Survival needs tempering because of its current inaccessibility. With no copper in the starting zone and almost all the initial craftable items requiring copper, I couldn’t experience anything beyond the first few waves and lowest-tier crafting. The promise of automated electricity, food, and parts farms surrounded by protective bases is alluring, albeit unattainable for now.
In at least one aspect, Triton Survival punches above its alpha weight with its appealing aesthetics. Art departments working on games–AAA and indie alike–have been crushing it recently, and Triton Survival proves no different. Across my short playthroughs, I constantly felt the need to just take in my surroundings and smell the digital flowers. The dynamic weather, colorful pastel palette, and semi-blocky art style all centerpiece well to the glitchy, technocentric music, and SFX.
Triton Survival’s unique blend of mechanics push some genre boundary lines, making it difficult to situate its position within the larger games catalog. Survival-RPGs like Subnautica and all-time-greats Terraria and Minecraft share similar gameplay drives and similarly took a long time to flesh out. In order for Triton Survival to become the game it wants to be, there will need to be a team working on implementing new features years after full release.
In conclusion, I must warn against using the concept of potential as praise. Too often games are overpromised and run-too-thin in the real goodness, and I hope Triton Survival can hit on all of its goals. It’s hard to play right now, but when the beta and full release come out, you can bet I’ll be preparing my interplanetary bases for Armageddon.
Overall: 7.5/10
Check Out the Triton Survival Trailer:
Triton Survival’s releases June 21, 2019 for PC via Steam Early Access. You can wishlist the game right now.
Steam Review
Recent Michigan State University grad and current Game Studies researcher who plays fantasy RPG's to escape, Smash to compete, and Stardew to chill. Also have a +1 to rage/toxicity resistance due to the many hours sunk into WoW, R6, and LoL.
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