Instead, Dysmantle is more concerned with challenging players to unravel the island’s various mysteries. But while this might be how to technically beat the game, it doesn’t offer much narratively to drive the game forward. The central goal is to find a way off the island, which inevitably takes players to every corner of the island in search of rare resources that can be used to power up an escape pod. As far as he can tell, no other humans managed to survive. The game opens on the main character, a gruff, middle-aged man, emerging from his bunker to find the island he once called home has been overrun with strange mutants. This is how all survival crafting games should be.Dysmantle’s story isn’t really the focus of the game, but 10tons has included a fascinating tale nonetheless. Nothing feels foisted upon you, but the amount of things to discover behind walled-off areas or frozen wastelands motivates you to gather and craft materials that let you explore them. Underworld gives you even more of that plus some bonus features like an island home base for building up your dream outpost, provided you make it that far.ĭYSMANTLE's survival-based gameplay works in large part because of how even-handed 10tons is with its mechanics and systems. Even though there is some designed gating of areas, DYSMANTLE does a great job of giving you plenty of actually fun things to do and explore without feeling too restrictive or grindy. Its world feels organic, mysterious, and conquerable at all points of the game. This kind of design is what ended up selling me on DYSMANTLE. It's not the easiest region to work through if you haven't crafted or upgraded a lot of gear, but its opening area unlocks a lot of gear blueprints and provides easy forage points for rare materials that can accelerate your progress even if you are just starting the game fresh. You can stumble across the entrance to this area at any point in your journey, and it adds a ton of mystique to the game on top of more stuff to do. With the Underworld update (available for $4.99), the game adds a whole new subterranean area to the game along with new quests, enemies, gear, and more. Foraging, finding new campsites, and activating towers that reveal regions are almost always an easy thing to pursue, and along the way those can give way to quests, boss fights, finding hidden treasures, and discovering all kinds of new layers to the game that you might not otherwise know are there.Įverything I've written about to this point applies to the base DYSMANTLE experience. It doesn't take a whole lot of time to find tons of things to do, though. This lack of direction can feel frustrating and probably contributed to me putting down the game upon release. I simply hadn't walked in that direction yet! As an example of this I came across a prompt telling me how to dodge roll around hour 10 of the game. There are, of course, some tutorial markers near the opening area that teach you the basics of crafting and combat, but those are easily missable as the game opens wide open almost immediately. You simply emerge and then essentially need to figure things out. There isn't a whole lot of story or direction to DYSMANTLE. On combat, DYSMANTLE also keep things simple, making the wade through zombie encounters thankfully pretty short but definitely challenging at times. There's no hunger or thirst meters, weapons can't break, and your inventory is a smart balance of managing the limited amount of space in your backpack to figure out what to dump into crates at campsites scattered across the map, which have unlimited storage. All of the mechanics that usually annoy me in these games aren't there. Where DYSMANTLE creates an edge though is in its balance of survival systems. It feels like this exact kind of game has been done time and time again. All of the underground supplies have been exhausted, so you have to fend for yourself by foraging from the leftovers of civilization to craft tools, cook food, make clothes, and forge weapons to fend off hungry zombies. DYSMANTLE is a pretty amazing title, and the Underworld DLC is a welcome addition for new and old players alike.ĭYSMANTLE is a survival and crafting game where you play as a man emerging from a subterranian shelter years after the onset of the zombie apocalypse. Fast-forward to now where the game has recently been updated with a new expansion and I can hardly keep my hands off of it. A directionless open world zombie game just wasn't really gripping me in that moment, but I made plans to go back and check it out eventually. When DYSMANTLE initially came out, I bounced off of it pretty quickly.
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