The Colorado-based, development team, Smartly Gophered Games, is back with another title a little different from their previous titles which were based around vehicles. Their latest title “Your Journey of Survival” is an open-world survival game set in the year 2400 where you awaken with nothing but the view of the natural world taking over. It’s your job to rebuild from the ground up and unlock the secrets around the place. A promising title concept that I was pleased to learn was developed by only two people and is currently running in an ‘Alpha 1.1’ build.

Starting, you are thrown into the deep end and put on an island to learn how to survive and become the strongest person around. You don’t need to be concerned too much as no predatory animals are running around apart from a deer that can be tamed as you walk up to and pat it. The resources were quite simple to obtain and once you work out what is what, getting all the resources to build your base becomes a simple task. There are no levels or resource caps added into this title in the current build so if you can obtain the resources like wood or stone or even better the ore scattered around the place then you are set and go build until your heart’s content.

Some dedicated servers are built into the multiplayer section of this title and would love to see the servers more populated over time in the future. If you are a survival game PvP lover, you would know that the first thing people do is look for bases to raid which I might have done a couple of times for testing purposes, of course. I would have loved to see some more aggressive NPCs to break up the fact a lot of the servers had a sparse community. I did run around checking out what people have built and waited for a person to join so you could chase them down and shoot them for something to do, alas a rare occurrence. I’d love to see some things like clans added to multiplayer so you could have some huge bases of operations and maybe some more defensive measures added as it’s not hard to break into someone’s base with a locked door with a simple takedown of a wall.

I’ve been so used to getting tutorials on games that I was shocked when there was not one in this but it’s as simple as pressing “ESC” and clicking on controls to find out. Whilst you are there, if there is something you don’t like you can change it to whatever keybind tickles your fancy. The controls seemed to work well aligning with most survival games you would play on the PC so everything felt fluid. There seemed to be some slight delays when switching between tools that were in the hot bar so if you were using something in the second slot and wanted to flick over to the first sometimes it took a couple of times pressing it for it to happen. That was the only issue I had control-wise though this does become even more tedious on the controller to tab between slots. “F” got a good workout as that is the keybind you need to click to use anything or pick up items lying around on the ground.

The game is built in Unreal Engine 5 and the environmental graphics don’t disappoint. The lighting, shading, and textures in the environment are beautiful to look at and pull you into the game further. Being able to run around and see the long grass blowing in the breeze or looking up into the starry night sky when you hide out in your base at night is gorgeous. I was also surprised with the attention to detail put into items that you hold like firearms or simple things like the pickaxe or the axe.

I was super disappointed with the clothing in the game. I’m not someone who gets worried about skins or customisation in games too much and if there is one simple set like at the moment I’m generally happy if executed right. When you put them on the helmet however, I had my character’s hair clipping through it, the shirt and jacket were bugged and had all the skin coming through them and the jeans looked like I was a cowboy wearing chaps. This is something I was super confused about as it was a pretty glaring issue to have had not been fixed. Seemingly, you can go from third person to first person with the simple click of “V” to see this.

The only other thing graphically I will comment on is that I would have loved to see some 3D modeling put into the different textures on your building so that when you upgrade from the timber to the stone it adds some 3D effects to make it look like actual stone and not just a wallpaper slapped onto the timber. The same with things like the stairs, for example, which just texture changed. As I mentioned before the game is in Alpha so there should be lots of updates and quality-of-life adjustments coming and keen to see what the development team can produce.

The emptiness lets the game down a little but there were some things I admired in the audio. There was some attention to detail with birds chirping but unfortunately, none were flying around and once night hits you could hear crickets and what sounded like cicadas. You needed to learn to tune out super quickly on jobs like mining or chopping down trees as that noise got largely repetitive like most survival games. It would have been nice if there were a couple of sound variations added so that when you hit the tree it would play the sounds at random and you don’t need to hear the same sound time after time. The firearms audio was not bad though but sounded like something from the original Call of Duty back in 2003. With the assets out there for use these days it would have been nice to hear something a little louder and more realistic sounding but I guess in the game’s current state there is not much to shoot at apart from other people and the occasional deer you come across.

If you are chasing a new survival game where you can watch the development progress like most do over time, this is for you. If its current state is anything to go off the game this is going to develop into lots of fun for survival lovers. These two devs have created a solid foundation to build off. Pun intended.

Written by: Hayden Nelson