Abiotic Factor is a unique spin on the survival craft genre, seeing players take the role of brilliant scientists locked away in an underground facility infested by multiple-dimensional beings and gunmen. Armed with nothing but your wits and common office supplies, it’s up to you and a team of other players to survive and escape the horrors of science gone bad.
Abiotic Factor feels inspired by two incredible titles: Half-Life and Project Zomboid. The Half-Life inspirations show in the game’s visuals and theming, with the whole game feeling like a prolonged version of Gordon Freeman’s escape from Black Mesa. The Zomboid inspirations show up in the game’s crafting and skill systems, which I’ll get into in just a minute.
Abiotic Factor tasks you with not only escaping the facility through a series of connected quests that have you repairing or otherwise traversing areas of the lab but also surviving long enough to do so. With very little guidance on how to proceed, the game invites you to explore the facility and, with the presence of more and more deadly aliens and basic survival needs like hunger, thirst, sleep, and potty time, encourage you to build a base and survive as sunless days become moonless nights in the underground.
I’ll be making a lot of comparisons in this review, not to diminish the game’s uniqueness, but rather to illustrate how many familiar feelings it evokes despite its seemingly simplistic design. To make one such reference, albeit a bit of a dorky one, the game’s office-building survival craft setting, along with the cycling of power (the lights go off at 9 pm, making everything much more different), reminds me a lot of the SCP story Infinite IKEA. It has much of the same surrealist feeling, fighting for your life to survive and making makeshift camps and equipment just from the stuff you’d find in a sub-ordinary office building.
I bet a game made by these developers in said setting would go hard.
While you can play the game solo, Abiotic Factor was clearly meant to be played with multiple players. With a variety of skills requiring strict dedication to master, the game works best with a team of specialized scientists, applying their unique abilities to different aspects of the game to make the most of the resources you find, bringing us to character creation.
When joining a server or hosting a new game, you’re met with your first and perhaps most daunting choice: Your PHD. This determines your role, which depicts the stats you start with when entering the lab. If you’ve played Project Zomboid, you’ll find this character creation pretty comparable, and just like in that game, I found myself with a bit of option paralysis, especially in future runs, as I began to understand the game more.
To make another Project Zombid comparison, the game uses a very similar skill system, whereby skills increase by actively interacting with the world around them. To put it more simply, you get better at things as you do them, and skills aren’t necessarily tied to the role you chose at the start, meaning a Lab Assistant can swing a baseball bat better than a Defense Analyst with enough practice.
Something I found really cool about the game’s survival craft mechanics would be the “idea” system. Certain blueprints have to be thought up, like a scientist discovering a new invention or creating a unique solution to their current problems. This makes for a minigame where, to learn a blueprint, you have to accurately ascertain which components from a given list are the proper ingredients to making your invention a reality. It’s a fun little detail that adds a bit of immersion and player interaction to the game and breaks a bit away from the crafting game tedium.
Since the game is in Early Access, some bugs and glitches are expected. The most intrusive of those I experienced was a few crashes to the desktop, which, unfortunately, I had quite a few instances of. The crashes seemed related to the game’s physics engine. When dismantling a vent cover or defeating an enemy, something would drop the wrong way and collide with the environment, and I can only assume they split a digital atom, causing the game to lock up and crash.
Though, again, I try not to judge a game’s bugs too harshly in Early Access, Abiotic Factor’s particular problems made for a frustrating and challenging review process. I’m talking about frequent crashes; An item drops, it crashes. An enemy jumps into me, and the game crashes. It was inconsistent enough that I never knew just what might trigger it but consistent enough that I was stuck on the same segment I should have cleared in about two minutes for an unbearably long time.
I eventually got around this issue by switching to another machine, which was almost identical in stats to my main PC but with a slightly better CPU. Though my first computer met the game’s system requirements, it seems that if your CPU is on the weaker side, you can experience some pretty frequent crashes in Abiotic Factor’s current state.
My only real criticism of Abiotic Factor is that the game can feel oppressively hard early on when it comes to combat, at the very least if you’re playing solo. If you encounter anything bigger than the hedgehog-like hopping enemies, good luck. Your only means to survive any combat encounter before quite a few weapon upgrades is by unlocking larger foes with nets, which still eats up a lot of resources due to the enemy’s large health pools. You can always try sneaking around, but it’s not always as viable an option as the game presents it.
Overall, Abiotic Factor is a fun multiplayer survival game with great potential. It wears its inspirations on its sleeves and harkens many familiar feelings (at least it did for me) while still being utterly unique.
Pros:
- It is a unique setting that proudly wears its inspiration, giving a familiar and nostalgic vibe while being something of its own.
- Interesting survival mechanics that take advantage of the game’s unique setting and premise.
- A highly interesting Sci-fi setting filled with cool concepts and some good humor.
Cons:
- Players with CPUs on the lower end may experience crashes with the physics engine.
- Some balance issues, at least in single-player.
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