Stranded: Alien Dawn

by Aethyna Oct 20, 2022 | 1 Votes | 33 Played | 0 Reviews

9 rate

Genres:

Simulation , Strategy

Graphics:

Labels:

Survival , Building , Aliens

Platforms:

Publishers:

Frontier Foundry Stranded: Alien Dawn is a sandbox-styled, base-building survival game where you get to build incredible bases while exploiting the local resources for your survivors’ use, ensuring that their needs are all taken care of. Will you be able to help your survivors survive long enough for them to be potentially rescued? Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Set in the aftermath of the disastrous destruction of a massive colony ship over an alien planet, Stranded: Alien Dawn is a sandbox-styled, base-building survival game where you get to build incredible bases while exploiting the local resources, after learning about them, for your survivors’ use, ensuring that their needs are all taken care of. Will you be able to help your survivors survive long enough for them to be potentially rescued?

Plotline

The game doesn’t give you much detail about how the colony ship was destroyed; what really happened in space, but you do get to experience the results. Escape pods were ejected from colony ship and that’s how your survivors ended up stranded on this alien planet. The goal here is to survive and hopefully find a way to contact any passing spaceships so you could get rescued.

Gameplay

The game starts off by letting you choose which 4 survivors you’d like to bring with you. Each survivor has their own strengths and weaknesses, and it’s crucial to have a good balance across the board just so you could cover all bases. The game also lets you prioritize your survivors’ tasks, after disabling “Simple priorities”, so you could get a person with a high Farming skill to be the colony’s dedicated farmer. In fact, if you’ve played any similar games before, this setting needs to be the first to go since it opens up so much more options for you to really customize your survivors’ behavior. Anyway, once you’re done, you’re ready to start the game!

As with all base-building games, you’ll start with setting up a shelter with a light source for the night. To do so, you’ll need to start gathering materials for construction, whether by scavenging spaceship debris for scrap metal or by chopping logs. You’ll start with a basic shelter, but with the right research, you can quickly set up a modest house with several rooms dedicated for different activities, be it sleeping or crafting. It’s important to start with a modestly-sized home mainly because it would be a pain to heat it up during the winter, especially when you’re just starting out.

Once you have the electrical grid (and several other related research) unlocked and can start setting up solar panels to power your home. Gone were the days when you’ll have to have someone keep refueling the torches you’ve placed all over the walls! The game even comes with switches and sensors, once you have unlocked the corresponding research, allowing some amount of control over power use and, in the case of sensors, automation based on factors like day/night cycle for light switches or motion for your automatic machine gun turrets.

With good design, enough research, and a strong power grid, you can eventually set up a multi-story house, complete with air-conditioning and heaters, and a solid automatic defense. Oh, and your survivors get their own rooms too!

Now, your people can’t work on an empty stomach so you’ll want to stockpile some food too, but unlike construction materials, you’ll need to first identify which of the juicy-looking fruits you see around you, since you’re on an alien planet and all, can be eaten by Observing them.

Some of the wild fruits or crops you gather can’t be eaten directly so you’ll need to first cook them. The same goes for much of the meat you can get by hunting the local wildlife. Although you can choose to first Observe them to know if they’d turn aggressive when they are being shot at, it’s fairly easy to differentiate the docile creatures from the aggressive carnivores – the carnivores will usually leave a body trail of other wildlife that you can butcher some free meat from.

It’s also important to have a variety of foodstuff just so you can keep your survivors happy so make sure to cook different kinds of food and store them properly, preferably in a freezer when you unlocked it later on, but in a simple stockpile under a roof works too. However, know that the chosen storage method will determine how long an item or food can last. You’ll want to make sure the foodstuff you’re stockpiling for the winter, for instance, can actually last the winter.

Farming is another crucial way to get food, best used once you’ve gotten your footing, probably somewhere early mid-game. After all, at one point, likely after your first winter or a long bout of cold snap, you’ll realize that it’s getting harder to find forage for food in the wild mainly because the plants have all died from the cold. Setting up a farm isn’t as simple as just allocating some plots of land near to your base though! Firstly, you’ll need to “discover” the crops you want. You can do so by Observing them in the wild and once you’ve unlocked their discovery, you can then plant and grow them... no seeds needed!

There are certain types of soil… hint: loam… that will give you maximum harvest as well, so you’ll do well to maximize the gains you get, thanks to your farmer/s efforts. The local fauna loves a feast too so you’ll want to protect your crops from them. Usually, a simple fence would do the trick but of course, there are times when you’ll need to rally your survivors to defend your food source from starving locusts-like bugs.

Unlike most farming games though, there’s no need to regularly water your crops so that’s a chore your people can skip doing. All you need to do is to sow the seeds in the right season (not winter) and harvest the crops when they mature, which would usually require a lot of storage that you should definitely prep beforehand, preferably before they go bad.

As with any survival game, research is the key to advancing your colony, allowing them access to better tools, gear, and facilities. Starting early is highly recommended. In fact, it’s even better if you have a high Intelligence survivor to be your colony’s dedicated researcher since researches take a while.

Once you think everything’s peachy, the game starts throwing various challenges at you. Events, such as heatwaves and cold snaps, may occur that will drastically change the temperature outdoors, possibly making it hard to get your people to go outside without suffering a penalty to their happiness. Sometimes, spaceship debris will fall, giving you another source to scavenge some scrap metal and other items. Meteorites that fall also give you sources of ores that you can then smelt into useful metal alloys that are in high demand mid-game.

The game will also periodically send angry insects or animals to your base. Thankfully, there’s one important factor that makes base defense a lot easier – they will make a beeline for the entrance of your base if – and only if – you have it opened. If not, they will attack the parameter of your base, meaning the fences or palisades you’ve set up, causing a real massive headache when it comes to repairs and responding to breaches in your defenses.

This kind of enemy behavior also makes it easy for you to set up traps, since you know which path they will take to approach your gates, especially if you’ve built a good old, zigzagged maze leading right up to the gates. You can even set up turrets, like flamethrowers, to burn those bugs to crisp and prevent your survivors from taking too much damage, especially the severe kind. However, do note that there are bugs that can fly, allowing them to bypass most of your defenses on the ground.

Note that although bugs will head for the gates, your people don’t have to use the gate, and hence, go through your “defense maze” just to get out. There are small fence doors that you can add throughout your fencing that only your survivors can use. Thank goodness those bugs weren’t all too bright!

You can also draft your survivors, just so you can take more direct control, allowing you to get them to hunt down the aggressive critters before they even make it to your base, or you could simply station them in the right spots around your kill zone just so you can take down the enemies even faster. In a way, this makes fights feel a lot like a pause-based RTS.

However, unless you’re just starting out and have to manually defend your base, there’s really no reason to put your people in danger, risking injury and a penalty to their happiness, when you have automatic guns and flamethrowers to do the work for you. This is especially true when the enemy numbers start increasing per wave. You just need to have a good defense strategy and design!

At this point, you probably be wondering – why happiness is so important here? Well, in this game, survivors who have “depleted their happiness” will suffer from a meltdown, which can range from fits of rage to wandering aimlessly and refusing to take orders, all of which may potentially lead to the survivors’ death. Since it’s very hard to find and recruit new survivors here, you’ll want to make sure you keep the ones you have.

There are many ways you can fulfill your people’s needs to the point where they are happy. For starters, you can build several different forms of entertainment, more so once you have the musical instrument research completed, to give them an outlet to let out some steam. Giving them individual rooms will grant them a nice boost of happiness every time they sleep while preventing the movement of other early risers or late sleepers to disturb their precious sleep.

Of course, as mentioned before, food variety and quality are both important too, so is making sure they are well-clothed (for the season), well-rested, and in case of injuries, well-healed. Wear-and-tear is a thing here, so you will want to gather the necessary materials to craft a myriad of new clothes for your people when their old clothes turn into tatters. The same goes for the weapons they have on hand. For healing, there’s a selection of healing items, like healing balm and bandages, that you can craft via the workbench as well.

As you advance, you’ll eventually unlock the option for long-distance travel, allowing you to build a hot air balloon and send your survivors to distant places to scavenge for stuff, find and rescue other survivors, or even discover some interesting revelations. Often, you’ll also be required to make a decision for a scenario your explorers have encountered in their travels.

Personally, as a fan of Rise to Ruins, Kingdoms and Castles, Colony Survival, and Castle Story, I’ve found the game to be very hard to put down. With the game running at max speed, there is always something new on the horizon, besides all the current ongoings of maintaining a thriving colony and expanding your base.

That being said, the game does have some issues still. The game’s AI, for instance, will send my character to bed while being “ravenously hungry”, which is one stage shy of becoming starved. In many instances, I had to pitch in and micromanage my survivors just so they could get their needs fulfilled before they head to bed. The game seems to have some pretty tame character events too. I think they could be made to be more impactful.

There seems to be a bug with weddings as well – and yes, you can marry your survivors once they get to that point in their relationship. Despite having both characters at the wedding arch during the allotted time for the celebration, the wedding isn’t starting. Note that, for some reason, the couple won’t head to the arch themselves and I had to draft them in order to make them go there. Undrafting them at the arch didn’t work either.

The game could use some balancing too. Farming takes a long time to bear fruit and some items, like shirts, can't be crafted with materials other than cloth. Crafting outfits also need to be faster and consume fewer resources. It took way too many pieces of leather, and way too long to tailor a simple leather vest when I need 4 copies of it, along with pants, shoes, helmets, and jackets for all the survivors. There's no guarantee you can find clothes while scavenging either, so at one point, usually tens of hours in, you might find yourself hard-pressed to get your survivors properly dressed for the weather.

There also needs to be an easier way to clearly highlight items that my survivors have dropped in the wild. I can't be zoomed in and scouring every field of grass for the stack of hide my hunter has decided to leave behind for some reason.

Dunes and Moons Update
Released on December 1st, just less than two months after its early access launch, the game has rolled out a major update, consisting of a brand-new desert biome, the Desertum as well as a new survivor who is perfect for the new biome, Sora Satoh.

The update also added a new moon-based system. Depending on which one you chose - Jason, Nyx, or Chaos - you'll drastically change up your gameplay, making it more entertaining. For instance, Jason will make wildlife attacks a bit tougher to deal with, but you'll be given plenty of time to prepare and recover, while Nyx will make the local fauna attack your base more frequently at night. Chaos is pretty self-explanatory since it'll just make wildlife events unpredictable and well, chaotic.

The game also had some difficulty adjustments, making it generally easier to play. There's even a "Peace First" game rule which is great for players looking to just build. However, if you're looking for a challenge, know that there are two tougher difficulties added to the game as well, namely Very Hard and Insane.

Considering that most players, like me, would choose to start with the best - read: most varied skillsets - characters, the update added in a random perk for players who chose the "Random Survivors" option, just so they'd be encouraged to play with a random team.

Tame & Train Update
A momentous update in its own right, Tame & Train adds the ability to tame the many exotic creatures in the game and train for domestic purposes, such as for an animal farm, as well as for defending your base. Naturally, you will need different levels of skills, food, and tenacity to tame different animals, and once successful, you'll also need to tend to their happiness and care. This update includes 3 different dog breeds too. To help, you'll also get a new survivor, Hugo Delano. He's a whiz at taming and can occasionally improve the farming skill of others.

However, tamed animals can't be used as beasts of burden for some reason, and couldn't be used to haul resources from faraway places to your base. It seems like a huge oversight for the devs to miss this crucial role. They also couldn't be used by your survivors as mounts, either to travel or for battle.

Sow & Sell Update
This update brings a whole new campaign scenario complete with a brand new story, challenges, and end goal, along with a new survivor, Vicente Santiago, who has a haggler’s mindset and high farming skills, making him the ideal survivor to have for this scenario. In this campaign, trading takes front and center, with the ultimate goal of setting up a trading outpost and eventually, earning enough to buy the entire planet. The update also contains new plants and recipes, as well as a host of QoL updates and bug fixes.

Graphics/ Sound

The graphics in this game is absolutely astounding! Instead of playing the game from a god-like view all the time, I find myself zooming really close many times throughout my lengthy playthrough just so I could take really nice screenshots of my survivors and the alien world around them. The only downside, I guess, is the lack of a proper photo mode… pretty please?

In terms of sound, the game features some really relaxing Western-like tunes that you can enjoy while playing. The funny thing here is that the game isn’t a Western title at all, but the music doesn’t feel jarring or disconnected from the theme. Instead, the music gave me the sense that I’m managing a group of adventurous pioneers, much like what the pioneers who ventured to the West to set up towns and villages from scratch.

Conclusion

Stranded: Alien Dawn clearly lived up to its potential and hype as an in-depth survival-themed base-building sim with a strong emphasis on base defense and exploration. The game manages to capture the wonders of discovery perfectly as players explore the gorgeous alien world, and the frequent challenges did their job well in keeping the players on their toes. There are some bugs to stomp out, minor tweaks needed to further optimize the game, and possibly even more content, but generally, Stranded: Alien Dawn can already give you enough entertainment to justify its price tag.

In short, this is a game that’s highly recommended for fans of Rise to Ruins, Kingdoms and Castles, Colony Survival, and Castle Story!