My game review of Sunkenland

[Mighty_Mogomra]

I think the game is quite good as a survival video game. I think the game can absolutely hold a place in with the survival game greats like Subnautica, ARK,etc.
I enjoy the weapon, food, vehicle, and tool crafting along with the base design/building.
I have been playing this game since its first release (pre public-beta).
I have made it to the end of Day 365 of enemy base assaults of my base in that version of the game using default game settings for single player (More on that in the technical issues section).
I play the game on a pc using Debian 12 KDE Plasma (linux desktop) and it works decent on Proton GE 8-4. (It works on Steam’s version of Proton 7.0; not 8.0 though.)

I think the game is slightly ruined by some poor game design choices and technical issues though.

The poor game design choices:

1. Requiring defenses and other items to use base metal to build them even when the item doesn’t use it is dumb. (Example: Wooden defenses requiring base metal with wood? That makes no sense. Rope or cloth with the wood? Sure.)

2. The two seated gyro-copter’s controls are terrible and dumb.
It makes no sense to require 2 buttons close to each other to turn a vehicle while in motion.
(In this case, W and E buttons to turn to the right and to bank to the right,etc.)
None of the boats require this control mechanic so why does this one have it?
Also, it doesn’t help that the default enter/exit vehicle button is close to those same buttons
(the F button).
Having to tilt the gyro-copter slightly forward to make it go forward and faster makes no sense either. Helicopters can fly forward horizontally and speed up as well.
Maybe streamline the buttons down to A and D for direction with W and S for speed up or slow down. Q and E for rise and lower. With the eject button staying as F in this default control scheme.

3. The twin mountain rock base current setup doesn’t make sense and is confusing.
Requiring a gyro-copter to get to the base? How do the people there get water to the base at the top?
I would assume they have some salt water distiller in their base to convert the water to drinking water? Also, how do they bring back loot from raids of my base when there are no other
gyro-copters on the landing strip I land on? It doesn’t make sense.

I found the base location confusing to navigate through (even with the lit up neon signs pointing the arrow to go downstairs.) I would pass right by them and not notice them until I was facing a specific angle. I would then see them. Bad design.

Having the rotating blades only do damage to me despite the enemy ai opponents walking through the obstacles is dumb. Also, turning the blades off by shooting the glass targets at the top was not a smart design choice either. I didn’t know I could do that until I looked everywhere for an open switch for the elevator and found nothing. I tried it out of frustration and boredom of not knowing what to do.

I would say a better design for that location would be to add a staircase or staircases to the top along the sides of the twin mountain rocks. I would have opponents along the staircases behind cover where they can hit you, but you have no cover or very little. This would force you to chose – take the hard path where a steady hand, great armor (with repair tools), great weapons and a TON of ammo will make you succeed or take the easy path by landing the gyro-copter on the base with no one attacking you until you reach a dangerous area where you could survive with maybe lower armor,etc?

I would rethink the spinning blade traps and maybe the way to disable them as well. Have the AI maybe not walk through them taking no damage and walking along the sides on the left and right instead where the blades maybe don’t touch? So it becomes you having to shoot through them to clear the safe path past them, otherwise; you take damage?

Also, the path design to the bottom part of the map (where the elevator is) needs to be rethought a bit. Keep the elevator with that being the only way up to the good loot. I enjoyed that part. Just getting down to it needs some reworking.

Technical issues:

1. The ‘pop in’ in this game is horrible. The enemies and locations will either not render correctly or not appear at all until I’m close to them. They then just ‘pop in’ to place.
This is regardless what graphic setting I choice,FOV,etc.
The ‘pop in’ still is there despite the updates. This was a problem when the game first came out and it still has not been fixed, sadly.

2. The multiplayer is broken and doesn’t work at all for me or my friend who also has the game.
If I host, he can’t join. If he hosts, I can’t join. Even the only ‘invite only my steam friends’ option just crashes us back to the desktop. I agree with dedicated servers if we can host them ourselves and other players can join official dedicated servers as well. I think what the original ARK did for multiplayer could work (non-dedicated servers) where someone hosts and others can join in to play. Main host keeps game saves. I would do without the network tethering, though. That tends to not be fun for others.

3. I’ve played a game of Sunkenland on the night of an enemy ai raid to my base, save it before they hit the shores of my base, leave the game completely, relaunch the game and load back into the game only to find that the raid would not still be there where I left off. It wouldn’t even restart the raid for that day.

4. I’ve also noticed that after playing the game for several hours (1 or more hours of game-play) some items (the pill bottles,sea shells, the washing machines,etc.) would not render crisp visuals and instead appear to be blurry looking in the inventory, storage or if you were right in front of it.
I have no idea why it does that.

5. Another issue I have encountered is the ‘no kill enemies’ glitch where the enemy ai can shoot at you, but it does no damage to them when you hit them. It still happens occasionally for me in game.
I often reload the game and then the game works fine again.

6. There was an interesting glitch in the pre-public beta version of the game where when you make it to the end of Day 365 it resets to Day 0 and no more enemy ai raids to your base happen regardless of what day it is. Has that glitch been fixed yet in the public beta?

7. I’ve had enemy music keep playing in the mutant base camp near the underwater school building where all the iron and copper metal resources are located despite me clearing out all the enemies in that location.

8. I’ve had the mutant enemy ai get stuck on the terrain or just stand there while I was attacking them up close. The other classes do not have this issue as far as I can tell.

9. I have had the game sometimes freeze the screen for under 2 min and then I can continue playing like normal afterwards. Before, it would lock the game up and I would have to manually close it and relaunch it again. So, it not doing that still is good, but this is a problem as well. I tend to save often (every 2-3 min in case it crashes,etc.) otherwise I lose progress.

To be clear, I do enjoy this game a lot despite the issues.
I just feel these issues I mentioned in the review need to be addressed and fixed for the game to be better. I look forward to seeing what is to come, Sunkenland devs!

[maximummax]

Hi! Thank you for your detailed feedback, it was noted! We will keep working on the improvements :)

[Mighty_Mogomra]

Appreciated. I wrote this review to bring attention to things I felt either needed to be fixed or addressed by the game devs. Hopefully, I offered some insight to your team on how to make Sunkenland even better! Thanks for making this great game!