Survivor: The Interactive Game (PC)
Developed by: Magic Lantern Playware
Published by: Infogrames

The things I do in the name of journalism are sometimes nothing short of courageous… or masochistic, depending on how you look at it.

Recently I forced myself to sit down and play a few games of Infogrames’ Survivor: The Interactive Game, just so I could bring you the ultimate, no holds barred truth. Unfortunately, it really is as bad as everyone says it is. I received the game for Christmas last year and almost 6 months later I finally got around to installing it on my PC (and only now because I happen to have some free time on my hands). I knew it was going to be bad… but believe me, it is downright painful.

Once again, another potentially cool game idea has gone to waste. This could have been a new twist on The Sims, where you control your character’s social interactions, but also occasionally compete in events. If they went on-line with it, they could have added a whole new dimension to the game, by allowing competition and collaboration with real humans. (Apparently there is a multiplayer mode, but you have to set up your own game — there is no way to search for existing on-line games.) Anyways, they just took this game licence and flushed it down the toilet, by assuming it will sell based on the name alone (which I guess it probably did).

Here’s how the game works: you choose your character from some of the participants in the first two Survivor shows, or you can create your own. There are a number of different attributes you can tweak, such as assertiveness, strength, and “empathy”, but I really doubt if they make much of a difference at all.

The part of the game that takes up the most time (and also what makes makes this game the most unplayable) is what they call the “survival period”. During this time, you are forced to wander aimlessly around camp striking up conversations with different survivors using a limited number of phrases like “How am I doing?”, “What do you miss most?” and “(Insert name here) is on edge”. At the beginning of each survival period you choose which role you want to perform within the tribe… for example, Fire Tender, Hunting/Fishing or Cook. There are only 6 different roles to choose from, so I assume the rest of the tribe members are just sitting around on their ass doing nothing. Apparently you must choose your role quickly to avoid being one of these slackers, but you have at least 10 seconds or so to click on one of the roles. Pretty intense. The survival periods last three full minutes, and they are extremely boring.

Now, apparently, the survival period is what determines how other tribe members feel towards you, but there is no way to implement any sort of coherent strategy here. I talked gibberish with all of the different tribe members and seemed to work up friendships with everyone according to my “Emotional Energy Meters”, and then I was the first one to get voted off. I have no idea why. The least they could do is tell you what you did wrong.

Well, even if the plotting and scheming is confusing, at least some of the events could be fun to compete in, right? Wrong.

The most amusing thing about the immunity and reward challenges are the terrible rhymes that make up your “tree-mail” message. For example, “The squares are a jumble/But with a squeak and a rumble/You can unmix the mixture/ To make a nice picture”. Now that’s poetry.

The events themselves are either boring, difficult to control, or both. For instance, one event was a slingshot challenge where you had to shoot at various targets as your character moves around an obstacle course. It was virtually impossible to hit the moving targets since they don’t actually display the projectiles that you are shooting — meaning there is no way to judge distance or timing. I’m not sure how many different events there are in the game, but I had no desire to keep playing in order to find out.

To make things worse, the game locked up my computer on more than one occasion. It was hard enough to bring myself to load up the game once or twice to try it out, but when it frequently crashes on you it makes the decision to avoid the game altogether that much easier.

Now, here is the real kicker: I only chose to play a “quick” game, but there are settings for even longer, full out Survivor games, to the point where you are playing a total of 13 rounds. All I can say to that is, if you really do make it through to the end of the game, you probably deserve at least a million dollars, if not more. This game bites. — Sean