Hands-on review: Impact Winter forces you to survive for 30 days

Imagine yourself living in the near future where another brutal 'Ice Age' has swept across the entire Earth and your only hope of rescue isn't coming until 30 days. Well the new game called 'Impact Winter' allows you to vicariously live through this nightmare scenario.

Impact Winter is actually not a new game as it was released on Steam back in 2017, although this year the PS4 and Xbox One receive the game for the very first time. Unlike the PC version of the game though, this PS4/Xbox One version is less buggy and the game technically runs much smoother this time around.

Anyway, in this game you assume the role of Jacob Solomon who is the leader of a small group of survivors hauled up inside of a church. A mysterious radio signal gives the team some type of hope as it promises that help will be on its way in 30 day's time.

Thankfully, Jacob Solomon is not alone in his quest for survival because he is accompanied by a robot by the name of Ako-Light. Ako-Light is pretty helpful because it comes equipped with a radar system as well as a torch that enables Jacob to explore areas in the dark.  At the start of the game though, you will have to go through a tutorial that teaches you the basics of the game's mechanics. You basically need to micro-manage everything that happens in the game and this includes telling the survivors what to do and how they should function.

All of the micro-managing is the bulk of the gameplay and this is where Impact Winter's biggest weakness starts to come into play. It gets very annoying and repetitive how you have to babysit all of the other survivors because they are too lazy and dumb to take care of themselves.

It's usually up to you to go out in the cold winter wilderness to scavenge for food, supplies and wood to keep the fire going. You can delegate some chores to the other surviving members, but most of the important stuff is allocated to the player.

The babysitting aspect of the game gets boring, although you can venture out of the church to do some other side quests. However, there are not many interesting locations for you to see as everything is covered in snow and most of the buildings are dark and abandoned.  Not to mention it can be sometimes hard to see walking around the dark thanks to its fixed camera viewpoint. You cannot zoom in further so there are lots of chances for you to miss important things while you are walking past things.

The only fun part that this game offers is that you can actually sabotage your mission and kill yourself early if you want to. Jacob can die a lot of ways including dying from hyperthermia when leave the fire off, dying from starvation or even getting food poisoning by eating rotten food.

The only downside to trying to kill yourself is that you basically have to start from the beginning all over again. I suggest you only try out these things if you are really bored or if you just want to muck around and have a bit of fun.

Overall, Impact Winter has an interesting concept and idea, although it falls apart due to its boring and repetitive gameplay structure. I've played other survival games before, but they were more fun and engaging than this. If you want to play this game, it's best just to wait for a sale or when it comes free on PS Plus or Xbox Live Gold in the near future.

Verdict: 6.0/10