I’m a games critic, get me out of here!
Green Hell is an Open World Survival Simulator set in the uncharted unique setting of the Amazonian rainforest. You are left alone in the jungle without any food or equipment, trying to survive and find your way out. Clinging to life, the player is set on a journey of durability as the effects of solitude wear heavy not only on the body but also the mind. How long can you survive against the dangers of the unknown?
There are a number of survival sim games out there these days and while some have managed it well like The Forest, there are those that make mistakes such as making the game’s controls clunky, poorly optimised and having a good number of glitches that hinder the gameplay. Green Hell was originally a PC game in 2019 so you’d think that a console port wouldn’t suffer any of these, right?
As good as an open sandbox game as Green Hell is, it does suffer from all those traits in one way or another. It clearly hasn’t received the optimisation of the PC version and your character controls rigidly at first, there’s also some screen-tearing, framerate hiccups and long load times to boot. On the plus side, it does have a good narrative and the survival techniques are well executed.
I did notice that sometimes buttons wouldn’t do what the game said they would do though, like the button for sprint did nothing and it’s one of the first things the game tells you about. Also, unequipping and equipping items like a weapon or resources takes a lot of patience as the menus are clunky to control.
There are a number of ways to play the game, either solo or with friends and there are multiple difficulty levels where you can either be left alone by the dangers of the jungle or you’re at the mercy of the animals and the tribes that inhabit it. You can also lose your sanity over time and while the sanity effects can’t equal something like Eternal Darkness (I assume because Nintendo copyrighted them as soon as they came out and still refuse us a remake/sequel, argh!!) they are still a nice change to the game.
The visuals are a bit of a mixed bag. The jungle itself is nicely detailed, but the character models are average and as I said, the game suffers from screen-tearing and framerate woes. The voice-acting is decent overall along with the sound effects.
The Verdict
Green Hell is a decent survival sim that mixes things up with your sanity, but it fails to optimise the console experience from a game that has been out for a while now. Hopefully, patches will fix up the issues the game has with its performance and controls. As it stands though, there are better games on the market.