Farewell Black Survival. You were a truly unique and interesting Battle Royale in a market saturated by developers all making various generic copycat shooters. By the time the game was finally taken down I had close to 400 hours in you, and they were almost all a blast.

It's sad to see you go.

Below is my original review.

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Black Survival is a deeply novel Battle Royale- so much so that although it fits the hallmarks of the genre (a large number, ten in this case, of people enter an ever-shrinking arena, fighting until only one survives,) I'd hesitate to even compare it to things like PUBG or Apex Legends.

This comes from two things in particular. One, is how the game is played. In Black Survival, everything is done with your mouse (although mastering hotkeys to raise your APM is very important,) and it takes more of a visual novel style. You go from region to region by clicking on the various areas of a map, gathering ingredients and weapons, and this is where the second bit of novelty comes from.

If you were to just use the basic equipment you found on the island, you would die very, very quickly. Black Survival is all about crafting. A hammer plus scrap metal equals sheet metal. Sheet metal plus a katana equals a nodachi- and that's one of the simpler routes! You could have routes with six, seven, even eight steps, and this is done for everything- armour, weapons, healing items, stamina items, accessories, traps, the works. This turns it from your typical battle royale into what is essentially a high-stakes game of optimisation.

If you go one route, how many items can you complete, and how good will they be? What if you have to deviate- what's alternate weapons can you make? What about healing items? Compounding matters is two things- one, every character is better at using different weapons, which will naturally effect your entire build as you move to different areas and gather different ingredients, and then, of course, the fact that everyone else is also trying to do exactly this, and they'll kill you to do it first.

It's unique, it's different, it's brilliant. Combined with its pricetag of a whopping £0.00, and the fact that whilst you're in the beginner leagues you get handled with incredibly thick kids gloves, there's really no reason not to give it a shot.