Looking to provide a unique experience, Breaking Walls has developed AWAY: The Survival Series, a game in which you play as a sugar glider and puts players in the wild world that they survive in. Releasing it to PC and PlayStation, players from both platforms have a chance to see if they have what it takes to survive in the wild. The experience was definitely interesting and a bit unique, but I do have to admit that this game had some problems as well.

Story

Venturing through a world lost to natural disasters, you take on the role of a sugar glider that resides on one of the few parts of the world where nature still thrives. Diving into the harsh reality of surviving out in the wild, players find themselves fight animals they would usually avoid and chasing down a bird that has snatched up your family. With the odds against you, it will take cunning and will power to survive.

Gameplay

The first thing you will experience in this game is the controls. For me, whether using a controller or a mouse and keyboard setup, the controls were the worst thing about this game. Your sugar glider moves forward based on the direction the camera is facing, so be ready to play with the camera a bit while climbing up trees and vines.

In the beginning areas of the game, the controls are actually very tolerable. When you are simply walking or running around on the ground, jumping to platforms or over short walls, the controls are stable and easy to control. It helped a lot that you can use the same lock-on feature used to lock onto a target you are going to attack in order to lock on to where you want to jump to.

This game is just a series of following the path that is laid out by glowing mushrooms and the occasional pathway made of dirt, vines, or other natural styles. Of course, the interesting parts are when there are enemies around to fight or avoid, but finding your way through the open area is the fun of this game. When you need to do a bit of parkour, lock on to where you want to jump and then just jump. If you try and do the jump without locking on to where you are going then make sure you are ready to fully control the movement - which is typically only needed to be done when at a gliding segment of the game.

Dangers in this game come from natural predators, the poisonous vines the are placed to stop you from going out of bounds, the many bodies of water, and then your hunger meter. As you make your way through the game, make sure you are eating mushrooms to fill your hunger meter and health bar. You can also kill small creatures, like grasshoppers, to eat as well. If your gliding stamina is low, make sure to eat the yellow grass blades to refill them.

When you are around a predator, the use of your natural instincts becomes useful. You will need to get through the area by either staying up in the height of the trees or dashing from bush to bush at proper moments. Using your natural instincts will show where the predator is at so you know when to time your movements. This natural instinct will also have a bubble-like pattern flowing outward from your sugar glider in the direction that you need to go.

Audio and Visual

I have to say that I was delightfully amused with the audio style choice for this game. While they could have gone with wild music styles and expressive tones, they instead used a very Discovery channel documentary approach. They had a narrator tell the story and explaining events as they were happening with fitting music moments to bring out parts of the game. It was very fitting to the game’s desired experience.

As for the aesthetics, it was fairly decent. While the graphical quality wasn’t outstanding, you get to see nature from a whole different perspective. The best part is that everything seemed to be appropriately sized too. It would have been easy for the developers to have made things bigger than they should have been, but every part of the world I came across really seemed like a very fitting size.

Replayability

If you are able to get a handle on the controls, then there is replayability to this game with the exploration mode. While I do suggest starting with the story mode as it gives a proper tutorial and brings you to an understanding of what this game is about, the exploration mode gives you the opportunity to literally explore everything and even control a wide variety of creatures and animals that you will find through the game world.

What Could Be Better

I really wish they would have had better controls for the game. I messed with the settings and even saw a toggle option to adjust the inversion of the controls, but regardless of which setting I put it on the controls still felt inverted. Not only that, I constantly got stuck on weird angles of walls or upside down on a branch, and to get out of the strange positions I had to struggle with the strange, uncooperative controls. If this was an occasional occurrence, it wouldn’t have been a big issue, but it happened all the time and even got me killed a lot.

Conclusion

AWAY: The Survival Series is a game with a solid premise, great setup, but is dragged down by the controls. The story mode isn’t super long and the exploration mode provides players the chance to have fun with everything the game offers, but behind everything this game offers stands the issues of the hard-to-use controls. If it weren’t for that, this would have been a great game as I truly enjoyed everything about this game, but the problem I noticed when I played the first alpha version of this game was sadly not improved on enough. It really is a shame because this game had so much potential and so many great aspects to it overall.