We are rapidly approaching the end of the year, and my game time is getting especially sporadic. This time of year things is a good time to be an online gamer, though, thanks to dozens of holiday themed festivals released in almost every game. It’s all so sweet and lovely and sugary that it makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it. Perhaps what I really need is something a bit darker to balance out my life.
Well, IfSunSets is just what I needed. The new survivalbox from Smilegate just released into early access a month ago, and the premise is pretty simple: You’re stranded on an island, and at night zombies come out to wreck, so you’ve got to find out how you’re going to survive… IfSunSets.
Now, with a title like IfSunSets rolling off the tongue like a peanut M&Ms-filled mouth realizing that it is not in fact filled with delicious almond M&Ms and that your deathly peanut allergy is about to kick in, you may wonder why Smilegate would name it that way. My theory is that a translation hiccup on top of a search for “other names for dusk, dawn, or dying light” came to pass, or maybe it’s a coder reference to an if statement. It gets betters, though: You may also see there’s some kind of subtitle beneath the game’s main title of IfSunSets. I, too, was curious. So I zoomed in close and… it says “If Sun Sets.” So the game’s title is IfSunSets: If Sun Sets. Insert chef’s kiss emoji.
OK, enough teasing – naming oddities aside, this game is wild
The game begins with a (very) brief series of cutscenes explaining a bit of the lore behind the game. I won’t knock it because I really do appreciate when developers add at least give a hint of story to their game. It always feels kind of lazy when you’re simply dropped into a game sans any real lore and told to just play.
The long and short of it is that this is your standard survival sandbox. You begin by running around, staring at the ground, and clicking like mad to try and pick up some sticks and rocks. My glob! Enough with these survival games and their sticks and rocks! If I had a stick and rock for every stick and rock game that had me start out by gathering sticks and rocks, well, I bet I could actually build one of these dang stick/rock hybrid houses!
Fortunately, the minutiae with the rocks and sticks doesn’t last too long. I mean, the gathering is a core gameplay loop, of course, but at least you upgrade pretty quickly. The tutorial moves you along to building a campfire and your first structure shortly as well. Also, there’s a fairy. Have I mentioned that? For reasons, you have a fairy that is guiding you through the start of the game. It’s kind of like Zelda’s sidekick Navi from Ocarina of Time. She’s much more detailed than I think Navi ever was, though. She’s more like Tinkerbell, really. Also, she can level up, she has her own set of powers and skills, and she can otherwise make your life much better.
Anyways, I know that zombies are going to come – IfSunSets – so when we get to the stage of the tutorial, where I’m able to build up some defenses as I make myself a decent little shack. I get some spikes on the ground, and that feels like it should do the trick.
The game clock is pretty great too, actually. While you do have an actual clock with time, there’s a skull above it that is slowly filling up red – like a reverse sand timer. Once it’s full, it’s officially sunset, and the zombies begin their assault on your humble abode.
The night lasts five minutes, so basically you need to survive for a five-minute gauntlet of wave after wave of zombies attacking. If you make it through, you get to go back to the normal survivalbox gameplay, rinse and repeat. There are also several different game modes, including a safe mode for builders and a harder mode for players after a challenge, so there’s some variability as well, plus secrets and other cool gameplay stuff in the island.
The night is full of terrors, and if you don’t know what to expect, you’ll never see it coming
Now, I knew there were zombies coming for me IfSunSets. I knew it. It’s right there on the box art. I even looked up a video briefly to see what was in store for me.
And yet I was not prepared. I was nowhere even remotely near prepared. If being prepared is a well-stocked bunker 20 yards away from your house ready for the end of all days, then I was a golfer holding my nine iron high into the sky from the top of the tallest tree shouting into the wind during a thunderstorm, “Come at me with all you got, Zeus! What’s the worst that could happen?!”
In other words, I wasn’t really ready. Neither was my poor potato computer.
The absolute absurdity is that IfSunSets’ zombies are insane. I figured, sure, the zombs will come, and I’ll slice a few down as they overrun my traps. But the sheer volume of them is crazy. Within a minute, I believe I had killed over 300 zombies. And it’s not like a big one counts as multiple kills! No, this is literally hundreds of monsters rushing into your base simultaneously. Sure, they pop like a piñata at a public park birthday party, but there’s so many of them!
It’s hysterical. It’s absurd. And it actually had me laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of it all. My poor, sweet computer never stood a chance. I even had the graphics turned all the way down, which is why my screenshots look so terrible. I think the zombies usually look like real zombies, but my computer couldn’t handle any details at all. So instead, it was like I was being overrun by a bunch of shadows – which is pretty horrifying as well, frankly.
I played for a handful of days in-game, and I might be teasing it here, but the time I spent gathering my first impressions was pretty fun. I wouldn’t say it’s the most polished or fully fleshed-out game – it’s early access, after all – but it’s an experience that I would recommend other players try out, especially survival sandbox fans. It can support up to four other players, so you should be able to create your own little island hideout with your friends too.
It also looked as if there is much more going on with the game’s lore than is first obvious, as well. Near the shore where I landed, I could see some magic stone circle, which I wasn’t able to play enough to gain the resources to unlock. Mostly I kept replaying that first night because it was so wild. There’s also a pretty huge skill tree and a large number of different types of buildings and traps, which I didn’t even get into the details on. In other words, there’s more here than just a basic Minecraft nightfall attack cycle on repeat, at least for those who dig in and survive.
I don’t know how much staying power it really has for the core MMORPG fan, but if you’ve got the time, I’d certainly say it’s amusing. IfSunSets is on Steam but uses an Epic Games account for multiplayer, so just make note of that if you’re considering it. Also, if you jumped down into the comments to berate me over mixing up Zelda and Link before making it to the end, then I baited ya, and I gotcha!
Every other week, Massively OP’s Sam Kash delivers Fight or Kite, our trip through the state of PvP across the MMORPG industry. Whether he’s sitting in a queue or rolling with the zerg, Sam’s all about the adrenaline rush of a good battle. Because when you boil it down, the whole reason we PvP (other than to pwn noobs) is to have fun fighting a new and unpredictable enemy!
