Developed and published by Supercube, The Pioneers Surviving Desolation offers a simple-to-understand, yet challenging survival base-building game. Survival games, in general, are one of my favorite genres. This game is no exception, and even with it still in development and early access, there are some bugs here and there, yet I love this game. I am excited to see how the finished product will look, but for now, I will still be enjoying my time with this.

Crash landing on Io, the innermost moon of Jupiter, take control of one of fifteen crew members, or currently five during early access, locate two more, and do your best to survive. Expand your base, explore the desolate landscape, find resources and repair your ship, all while managing the well-being of the three crew members. Use their talents and strengths to your advantage, and navigate the lighting storms and tremors that, at any moment, could spell disaster for your team.

The controls are fairly simple; navigate the area using the WASD keys, move your characters or interact with objects using the left and right mouse buttons. Each crew member has their strengths, such as electrical, computer science, athletics, and agronomy to name a few, and these attributes will help with how quickly certain activities are completed.

Build and upgrade your equipment to create new resources and unlock new craftable items to help you survive or even just sleep better. If none of your characters are good at something, fear not, they will slowly improve after completing the task, and over time they’ll become proficient in that specific skill.

The game looks immaculate, and even though my PC is a pretty high spec, it doesn’t take a high-priced machine to run, but the visuals might take a hit because of that. My experience has been great. It is a desolate moon; there isn’t a lot to see, but that does not mean it is not a sight worth seeing. My favorite visual of the game so far is your base. I just find the design and look to be quite nice.

The music, especially the main title, is full of bangers. It’s like those Hans Zimmer epic music soundtracks, where it starts at a pace that feels like you are in a hopeless situation but then builds into a ‘we will survive this’ orchestral ballad. In the game, for the most part, the sound of the machines is a nice touch, with the lighting storms and whatnot, but sometimes certain sounds will get caught in a loop and play over and over no matter where you are on the map. As you probably can imagine, having a constant banging or beeping in your ear over hours of game time can become an annoyance.

Being early access there are bound to be a few bugs, like the characters will sometimes stop functioning, though I did find a workaround that fixed this; when they became unmovable, I command them to sleep on the spot. This tended to reset them and they could be controlled again. Also, after a few tremors, the ground visually starts to split, yet my characters could still wall over the chasm like it was still solid.

One other thing that annoyed me a little was the timers. It gives you a warning when a lighting storm will hit your base, and static electricity will start flashing on the screen to let you know to return to the base. There is a timer of ten seconds before the storm hits, yet you can be struck before the timer hits zero, and getting struck lowers all of your skills by five, effectively making your unit useless.

These and the sound issue were the biggest bugs I have noticed, and they aren’t particularly game-breaking. Something I would like to see could be a help menu that explains a few more of the game’s details and how to do some things, like upgrading machinery, because that took me a second to figure out. Another thing would be the addition of multiplayer. Having the three characters controlled by you and two friends would be a lot of fun.

The Pioneers Surviving Desolation is an enjoyable game that offers many challenges and hours of playtime. I have spent over fifteen hours playing and I still feel like I have barely scratched the surface. If you get the chance and this seems like a game up your alley, try the early access. I’m looking forward to the full release, and I hope that any feedback I give will help improve an already fun experience.

Written by: Adam Brasher