Stranded: Alien Dawn Review

Thanks to Frontier Foundry for the code for this one, and this review is regarding the Xbox Series X version of the game.

A world on the brink, or at least the rim.

I remember being excited when I first saw the concept of Rimworld, way back, and then I watched countless hours of it – I watched it grow, thrive, and stand as pinnacle of the genre it came to spearhead.

Survival colony-sim Management

Others have come and gone, and they always fail to deliver on the complex relationships and downright hilarity of things like Rimworld.

When a pack of knife-wielding Alpacas comes gatecrashing your base, your colonists fight back, but two of them get in a fight afterwards over the Alpacalypse – you can only watch as the one stabs the other and puts the healer into a critical condition.

Then because of the fight, collapses and leaves the only living colonist to put them both to bed – the one who can’t heal…

Who then suffers a mental break, burns down the colony to the ground and walks off into the sunset.

I wanted to see all of this play out in full 3D though, because I love animations and I’m a sucker for really in-depth sets of animation that go so far as to have people step in/around stools to sit on them at tables.

Enter…

Stranded: Alien Dawn, which can best be described as What If? Rimworld but 3D.

Crash, bang, wallop, what a landing!

Rimworld: Console Edition came out onto the Xbox fairly recently, and I always sat there playing it and laughing uproariously when things when wrong for my tiny people – thinking back to the days of Little Computer People and the Sims, wishing I had a 3D Rimworld style game I could really sink my teeth into.

Hello Stranded: Alien Dawn, which hit 1.0 recently and released onto Steam, Epic, Xbox and PS old and current gen.

I couldn’t be happier too, because as far as console versions of tricky PC games – S: AD is absolutely superb. If you take away one thing from this review of it, it’s that the console control implementation for the controller (Xbox) is absolutely superb and sets a high bar for any other sim/management games to follow in its wake.

This is absolutely gold-tier control design.

Three flavours of survival

Stranded offers three ways to get your ‘colony on’, you can take the typical crash landing, or you can go for an outpost (where you have to earn enough to buy the planet) and a very awesome military outpost scenario which puts you in command of tooled-up badass soldiers who have to establish a military presence on a bug-infested world.

Starship Troopers anyone?

THE MORE YOU KNOW!

Haemimont Games know their stuff, and they should do, veterans of Tropico. They bring their considerable skills and experience to this genre, and hit the ground running at high speed. This is the most fun I’ve had with one of these games since Rimworld kickstarted my love of the whole idea of survival colony and colonist management.

But wait, there’s more…

The game comes with six in-depth, excellent tutorials, which I highly recommend taking a look at before you do anything. These run to 15-10m each and provide a seamless overview of controls and concepts core to Stranded, presented in an easy to understand, digestible manner that again sets a gold standard for tutorials in this genre.

They are also integrated directly into the game too, so if you say get power grid research up and running, you’ll get that tutorial offered to you during gameplay.

Absolutely excellent.

What do you do?

Let’s take the crash scenario shall we, and after setting a few things on the options screen, adjusting the UI and the scale to my TV, I was able to pick New Game and get rolling with my crew. I could also adjust Game Rules and enter a random seed along with picking from various difficulties – I chose one of the easier ones since whilst I play Rimworld, I’m not exactly the best at these kinds of situations.

After the pod crashed on the surface of this lush, animal populated world I had to get my survivors doing things quickly.

Pausing the game is easy, LT does that, and it toggles between your various speeds which can be set via LT and D-Pad Left/Right to decrease and increase speed respectively.

A quick pause and a survey of the area, plenty of wood, scrap (from the wrecked pod and ship) as well as some other resources.

Rule One: Observe things. Always observe things in Stranded, get your survivors looking at plants that are unknown and you’ll soon find sources of good, and maybe clothing, or even healing items.

Then there’s building storage and shelter, with sleeping spots for people.

Thankfully, all of this is done via the controller in a simple and effective manner – it’s really intuitive and the devs even added context sensitive actions to the various items you can interact with. Cursor over a tree, and you can cut it for example.

Or a berry bush, observe, harvest etc.

Once you get used to it, everything is really quick and simple on the controller, with numerous short-cut controls that make playing the game a breeze and most of all: FUN and enjoyable.

Time will pass, your colonists will do their own thing, and just like in Rimworld you can set things that you want them to do and their work/relaxation/sleep schedules. Again, all done on the controller and really quick to get the hang of.

You’ll want to experiment with all this, and again, tutorials will provide the tools you need to cope with this kind of thing. They will lean into their relationships, and begin to level up their skills and so on.

This is a colony-sim though, so expect things to go wrong – from illness to arguments, attacks by native fauna, as well as other surprises (especially the weather) you’ll be kept on your toes as everything ramps up.

You base can, and will grow, as you harvest and scavenge, research and plan your way from metal shelters to a fully-constructed base complete with buildings and other features.

There’s a lot to discover in Stranded: Alien Dawn’s tech-tree and the last update to the game brought in mechs, ayep! Mechs!

Automated turrets, motion sensors, wind and solar power will be yours eventually – as long as you have all the right tech researched, resources scavenged, and people who are good at building these things.

3D Alien Worlds

From the wealth of character animations, their interactions with the environment, each other, and attention to detail – the Rimworld-style genre has never looked or moved so well. This is excellent stuff and runs like a dream on the Xbox Series X. I’ve not had a single issue, or major bug I can think of – I’ve not had one crash either.

Simply put, this game is a looker and the fully controllable camera really brings you right into the action (or downtime) as you can observe your people in the rooms conducting research or making tools/weapons etc.

You can watch every moment as they fight vs. the alien creatures, and survive the hostile world around them.

It’s gorgeous and the thunder storms are especially fantastic looking when they happen.

You also get different moons, with two regions, so it’s not just the one planet with the same palette or designs too.

It’s the animation which really shines here for me though, and it might seem like a bit of a small thing, but having a character step around a stool to get seated at a table rather than just appear on it as if by magic, goes a long way in terms of immersion.

I want to see more of this in games.

Alien skies and Western guitar

Stranded has excellent sound design too, with the alien worlds brought to life with a rich sound palette, and some suitably Frontier Western sounding music if you want.

More than just a Rimworld Clone in 3D

Stranded: Alien Dawn excels at being a game like Rimworld, but charts it own course, marks its own innovations and breaks out of the mould set by the former. I’m really glad this came to the Xbox and it’s now one of my favourite games in this genre – I can’t wait to see what happens post-launch, because this feels like Stranded has a very bright future both on PC and console.

Time will tell, but my time with the game has been enough that I want to go back in again and again and push my little colony a bit further each time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, some bugs are knocking on my defences and my new motion sensor just went off.

I can hear the roar of the big machine.