Drake’s Odds: Survive’s gameplay centers around a world where aliens have landed on earth. A peace treaty has been put in place, but as they have a tendency to do, the peace treaty falls apart and sends the world spiraling into intergalactic chaos.
Why is Drake’s Odds: Survive Different?
For starters, you get to play as the aliens. Don’t get me wrong, I love being a human and if there ever was an intergalactic war, I would hope that the humans would be on the winning side.
But c’mon, how many times have we played the same format of humans vs [Zombies] [Rabid Animals] [Other Humans] (delete as appropriate). Surely it’s about time we gave the other side a shot.
Brain Washing / Mind Control
No alien game can be considered complete without a good dose of brainwashing. And Drake’s Odds: Survive takes it to the next level with multiple uses of brainwashing in PVP. Have you seen the film, Paul? Of course, you have! Imagine they’ve turned that into a game.
Take control of a bear and send them charging towards an enemy tribe, mind control a crow and watch your enemies fall from the sky. Learn what they are doing and how they defend themselves and plan an attack based on recon intel gathered from the skies.
You might be thinking, well this is all starting to sound just a bit too easy. No, it’s not, there are multiple dangers to factor in with brainwashing in Drake’s Odds: Survive. For example, any power you have, so do other players, so while you have your attention on a group of players or NPC’s, who knows who is watching and plotting against you.
Mind control can only be kept up for a limited amount of time too, so that bear you sent to terrorize another group of players, might just end up finding its way back to you too.
Weaponry
Whenever I think of alien games, I think of two things. Anal probing and ray guns. I don’t know if Drake’s Odds: Survive features anal probing and to be honest I’m really not sure if I want to know. But what I do know is, the weapons used are human ones, making sure that it’s a fair fight from both sides.
When you look at similar, fun alien games, such as Humans Must Die, you see over the top alien weaponry designed to dispose of legions of humans in one go, Drake’s Odds: Survive has kept it fair, with the aliens using weaponry from earth (Apart from a spaceship).
Vehicles
With a huge 64 km Map, vehicles are needed to get around. Again when you think of alien games you expect some crazy vehicles to be involved, thankfully that’s mostly not the case here, with aliens actually using the human vehicles and quad bikes to get around the map.
There is a spaceship that can be used. It features some pretty awesome weaponry, including a massive beam which can be used to throw and drag objects across the map.
Progression System
To progress and unlock new tools and building parts, Drake’s Odds: Survive has added a very unique new feature, a knowledge system where players must steal knowledge from other players.
Once you kill another player, you are then able to steal their knowledge, you can use the gained knowledge at a research table to unlock new tools.
If another player manages to kill you before you have used your knowledge points, they can then steal them, meaning you’ve lost them forever and will need to kill more players to get more knowledge points.
Seeing as this system requires players to kill other players to progress, I think it’s pretty safe to say this game is going to be very PVP oriented.
Base Building
Much like other survival games, Drake’s Odds: Survive features base building, allowing players a safe…ish place to secure their possessions and regroup and prepare for upcoming assaults.
While there isn’t a huge amount of information about the base building side of the game yet, from what we can see on the gameplay trailers, it seems safe to say that there will be a lot of options for making some awesome bases.
Summary
Finally, a PVP-oriented survival game where humans aren’t top of the food table, being an avid survival gamer Drake’s Odds: survival is essentially the game all other survival games have been preparing me for.
There have been numerous occasions where we have seen promising survival games, been promised unique features which have had us all excited to dive into the game, just to be let down by under-delivering final products, Drake’s Odds: survival’s gameplay footage already shows a solid product, which I cannot see letting us down.
It’s nice to see a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. When you look at similar survival games, it’s very rare to find a survival game that is not trying to be anything other than a good dose of fun for its players,. Games like Rust do have some level of silliness which almost makes it feel less serious. But when you get the level of toxicity in its players, it starts to become more of a serious game.
With Alien senses and possessions being thrown into the mix, I’m prepared for some fast-paced, high-octane PVP battles, and I for one cannot wait for Drake’s Odds: Survive to go live, just take my money!
