God Save Birmingham from developer Ocean Drive Studio, which intends to be an open-world sandbox survival game where you explore the 14th-century Birmingham, England, countryside infested with zombies. Instead, it’s a visually pleasing but clunky jaunt around a keyboard that I could not wait to stop playing.
A medieval survivor game with zombies sounds good on paper, and everything surrounding it is very much up my alley. I recently played the latest hands-on demo during PAX East in Boston, and came away with nothing but regret and 30 minutes I can’t get back.
Get BWT in your inbox!
Get BWT in your inbox!
As with any survival game, your goal is to combat hunger, sickness, thirst, weather, and other natural threats, but with God Save Birmingham, you’ll have to also contend with literal hordes of the undead. The roughly half hour I spent hands-on with the game was mostly a directionless mess, with little to no tutorials and a high learning curve if you’re new to the genre.
God Save Birmingham is too open and too directionless to work well.
The physics-based mechanics are undoubtedly the game’s most impressive aspect. You can pick up essentially any object in the game, and doing so will open new pathways for you to explore, you can trap zombies in rooms, and even throw objects like crates and pots to deal damage. And that’s about where the cool factor ends.
The controls are clunky and frustrating, and knowing what to do and how requires a bit too much sleuthing as the player. Sure, the game tells you when it’s time to eat, quench your thirst, find some warm clothes, and so on, but not knowing where to look resulted in me facing the game over screen almost a dozen times.
And if that’s not enough, fighting against the zombies surrounding you makes little sense. Combat is extremely slow (if you’re lucky enough to find a weapon to defend yourself), and getting surrounded by four or more of the undead was an almost impossible bind to get out of. There’s difficult gameplay, then there’s bad design, and this has the latter.
God Save Birmingham’s is a beautiful game, even if its systems are lacking.
It isn’t all bad, though. God Saves Birmingham is genuinely very pleasing to look at. The building and environment designs are all top-notch, with a nice lighting system that helps the lush green surroundings pop. The zombie models are well done and grotesque, and when combat does decide to work in your favor, lopping off a head or a limb is disgustingly satisfying.
For survival game veterans, the mechanics are realistic and what you’d expect. The lower side of the UI offers a full-body diagram of your character, and you can focus on mending certain parts of your body or keeping track of what ails you in the moment.
God Save Birmingham is an ambitious survival sandbox with an undead twist that is largely and unfortunately mostly unfun. A pretty veneer doesn’t mask the root of its issues, and I don’t know if I’m just missing something, but my time with the game at PAX would have been better spent elsewhere. Early access for the title is confirmed for this year, so here’s to hoping that we see some meaningful improvements.
God Save Birmingham is releasing on PC via Steam and does not currently have a release date.
