Remember during the end of the last console generation when everyone complained about the gigantic influx of zombie survival games? The argument was simple: there were too many zombie survival games and not enough innovation. How to Survive 2 reminds me of that argument. As cruel as it sounds and as much as I hate to admit it, Eko Software’s sequel has only added to the pile of other generic zombie games that caused people to fall out of love with the genre entirely.
Set several years after the original game, How to Survive 2 places you in the role of a silent survivor. Within minutes of loading the game—although loading said game will take a sixth of that time—you’ll meet Kovak, the lovable Russian mentor from the original game. Throughout your journey, Kovak will teach you many things from scavenging to killing and even building you own settlement which will be very conveniently placed just outside the tunnel system where he resides.
If you’ve played any games in this genre or indeed the last How to Survive game you know the shtick by now. You go around whacking and shooting various forms of undead people or animals whilst picking up as many resources as you can hold, craft health packs and weapons, and keep track of an annoying hunger and thirst meter. For the most part it’s a pretty standard affair.
How to Survive 2 doesn’t really innovate but it does expand on the original game in quite a few key areas. Crafting isn’t overhauled but it has been substantially upgraded with more available weapons as well as an added base building mechanic which you can level up over time with your character. Apart from this and its setting however, everything in between remains remarkably similar to Eko Software’s original venture.
How to Survive 2 adopts a very simple quest system. Wandering through the hub world will eventually lead you to side characters who could do with your help and as a reward you’ll get some resources. Unbelievably, the mission structure in pretty much every quest is undoubtedly terrible. Every single mission throughout How to Survive 2 is some form of fetch quest or “kill this particular amount of this particular enemy type” inside bland, cookie-cutter environments that never seem to evolve. Level design doesn’t get more complex or interesting, it just becomes more of a pain to traverse the stage thanks to steady increases in enemy density.
How to Survive 2’s difficulty is of a very artificial structure, much like the games of yesteryear or, well, games like Earth Defense Force. Instead of adding more difficult foes with unique ways of dispatching them, How to Survive 2 takes a much more direct approach by just making you fight more of them. While this does provide a challenge—mostly for your patience—these encounters are not only extremely lacklustre and boring but are also very easily exploited.
This is because AI in How to Survive 2 is not smart. In fact, it’s surprisingly archaic. The main method of attack for zombies is to run at you in a straight line and attempt to slap you—literally—which is hilariously easy to avoid just by simply running backwards a bit and then throwing whatever weapon you have at your disposal in their braindead faces. Whilst other enemies such as Spitters or whatever the tubby zombies are called have different move sets, their methods are generally the same: get close and attack. Of course, this is only when they aren’t getting stuck on the environment which, as luck would have it, happens way too often.
Combat is as rudimental as possible. Whether you choose melee or gunplay you’ll have to deal with some of the most basic methods of dispatching your undead foes that you can get. Melee weapons can either be used to hit an enemy or throw at them whereas guns can be, well, fired. Weapons never really feel very satisfying due to simplistic sound effects which are usually combined with even more simplistic animations. Each enemy can be stunned with a strong attack and then instantly finished with a “kill” animation which attempts to look cool but suffers from the same basic flaws as the rest of its combat.
As well as a myriad of performance problems involving screen tearing and frame rate drops in “demanding” areas, How to Survive 2 suffers from a UI that is not made for consoles at all. Many menus in the game are cursor-based as if you were using a mouse and cursors pop up all the time during conversations with NPCs or in menus that don’t even require that form of input with the controller. Clearly it wasn’t optimized for Xbox One. How to Survive 2 is not just a lacklustre video game but it’s also a bad port. I could look past everything else because I quite enjoyed 7 Days to Die but the fact that they didn’t even bother removing mouse and keyboard input markers is just bizarre.
Summary
How to Survive 2 isn’t a bad game but it does feel uninspired. Following the same basic principles of the original as well as the majority of its gameplay structure, How to Survive 2 feels more like an expansion—or a large patch—than a new game.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.