Stranded: Alien Dawn Review – Is It The New and Improved Rimworld?

In the planet survival game Stranded: Alien Dawn, you are in charge of a small group of people who are stuck on a new planet. Create your own story through engaging and immersive strategic gameplay as you make important decisions to protect your survivors.

There are a lot of reviews about this game already but none of them go into the details about its positives and negatives for it. Here you will find out what makes the overall rating for this game as high or low as it is. Let’s see what’s the rate of it.

Is It The New and Improved Rimworld? -Stranded: Alien Dawn Review

Pros

We shall start off on the right good and explore the good things that this game has to offer.

Characters

At the start of a game, you can choose four (we hate that we’re stuck on four) people with specially made backstories, skill sets, traumas, and relationships with each other. Once your survivors arrive and land on the map you made at random, these personalities can make moods worsen or get better.

We like that this makes the game more social and makes me less likely to pick the most skilled people. I think this part will be a lot of fun to play again and again once it’s fixed up.

The character system is a very interesting take that reminds us a lot of Rimworld but manages to even do a better job. A very big plus but it still needs a little bit more work to be done by the devs.

Beautiful World

The world is strange and beautiful. This is one of the few games where you crash-land on an alien planet. The planet feels:

• similar enough to Earth to be able to survive

• different enough to need a spaceship to get around. If you turn up your settings (but don’t), the land is more beautiful and detailed. I had a lot of fun just wandering around.

It is somewhat Earth feels and not like some other games where you are on a very distant and far away planet that feels nothing like home. Of course, having this beautiful and very similar world to Earth is a fantastic way to give us both something unique and familiar.

The world is also very beautiful. You can actually see all types of biomes and differentiate them very clearly. You can investigate and as you go you won’t get bored with the places and environment for hours.

More Than Just Survival

If you think that this game is just about survival and its harsh elements you are very wrong.

The game is about more than just staying alive. There is a big difference between surviving and living. At first, a good survival/builder game should really be about doing “whatever it takes to survive,” and once that line is finally reached, it should put a lot of focus on items that make the world better.

I love noticing how much more there is to do than just the bare minimum. You can make more than just soups and simple meals. Also, you could make cakes and steaks. You can do more with berries than just eat them. You can use them to make wine. The characters want to enjoy life, and I appreciate that they can. It gives the game a certain type of feel to it.

Amazing Survival Base Building Survival Mechanics

If you love Rimworld, and lots of people do, you will love Stranded Alien Dawn. It is basically all of those types of games that have up to 99% positive reviews, just made in 3D mode. Yes, of course, it is not up there yet, but with time it will get there.

The mechanics work perfectly. They are both complex and easy to learn. You will find out more things as you go and it isn’t a very distant game for beginners to give it a try.

Of course, the 3D element and the visuals do a lot of help. Also, we would have to say that the UI Interface works very well too!

3D

Oh wow. Having the ability to build vertically, and horizontally, look at the scenes and your base is just one of a kind. This is the type of thing Rimworld players missed the most. Well, now you will be able to get it.

The exploration method works amazingly in 3D too. Also, the maps, they are huge and very big but feel as though you are a part of it with the 3D overview. Overall, it is the biggest thing that people love about this game.

Cons

There are certain things that can be improved or simply don’t work well at all in Stranded Alien Dawn. Let’s see what they are.

Performance Issues & Bugs

That is the biggest Con of Stranded Alien Dawn as of right now. The game does really have a lot of issues concerning this regard. Players have been experiencing a lot of simple crashes even from the first moments when entering the game.

The devs have said that they are working on it but still, some people are left out of the game and can’t even join it.

The optimization is also terrible. You can have the best PC out there and still get very low FPS and performance rates when playing it. There are a lot of issues that could and definitely need to be looked at by the devs.

Story

The story as it stands is so simple that it feels like it doesn’t exist. Nobody expected and probably played this game for the story elements of it, but certainly, all of us had seen and waited for something more, right?

In other games like this, the player is responsible for making the story, but the game also provides the player with the methods to do this. Not in this game. With that in mind, we would really like the developers to devote themselves to making this either:

• an experience driven by the choices they’ve made, with more chance of cars and story components coming to the area we’ve landed on

• an experience driven by the choices the player makes, with more ways to be creative (like a create-a-character option, choosing how many people are in your beginning camp, possessing more power over the severity of individual elements, etc.)

This is a personal preference that may be to only some players. But still, we consider it as a Con.

Goal

In the hours that have been spent on this game so far, the main problem players will have is that they are still not sure what it wants to be. Whose story is being told? Why do the characters have choices? What is your role as a player, besides clicking here and there?

In this way, comparing it to Rimworld instead of Endzone seems kind of strange. Sometimes you will feel like you’re just building and fighting the very Endzone, but most of the time you will feel like you’re in charge of a colony that’s growing up (which is what I associate with Rimworld). At the very least, we need to know more about the people in the story. We’re excited to be able to have a bigger say in how this game goes and the story unfolds.

No Mods

As it is right now, there is Denuvo enabled for Stranded Alien Dawn. This means that the game cannot be tampered with. In other words, that means that the devs do not want any type of mods to be placed or worked for in this game.

This is a very big minus in our opinion. Having the possibility of players getting inside the game mechanics and systems, and working out something on their own is a must for these types of games.

Well, hopefully, this will get changed in the future.

Price

The game as it is right now is pretty high. This is something that can be put into the overall rating as a Con too. The game is good as it is, but it is mostly with promises about the future. So if you decide to wait a bit you can do so. Wait for a sale and get it for much cheaper.

Overall & Rating

Stranded: Alien Dawn is a very fun and interesting take on these types of games. The closest resemblance that I could get is a hybrid between Rimworld and Sims. It does have its issues and is pricy, but other than that, it is a very solid game.

Thank you very much for giving our review a look! You can trust us because we are gamers that actually play the games that we review. We hope that this guide has given you an overview of how good it is and whether you should get it or not.

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