Is this a zombie experience you should turn down?
Unturned players assume the role of a survivor in the zombie-infested ruins of modern-day society and must work with friends and forge alliances to remain among the living. Players will scavenge for supplies such as clothes, food, and weapons and craft resources like wood and metal to create strongholds and defences. Threats and danger run amok, and players must actively monitor health, food and water, and radiation levels.
Unturned is a survival game mixed in an open world with zombies in a visual style similar to Minecraft. It sounds good on paper until you realise a number of things, the main being that the game is free-to-play on Steam and the next is that this console version is broken to the point it’s pretty much unplayable.
I’ve played the game on the PS4 Slim, PS4 Pro and via backwards compatibility on PS5 and only the PS5 version runs the game at a steady framerate, the other two are laggy beyond belief, especially in split-screen. That being said, the game is also incredibly glitchy in split-screen where you sometimes can’t even pick items up, or sometimes you can’t even use items like guns. It feels like the basic mechanics of the game work less than half the time and that’s not even mentioning what crazy visual effects are going on inside some of the buildings.
I don’t know how to describe it other than trippy as textures and lights flay around like they are dancing with each other or something, and it’s happened on each machine I’ve played it on so I know it’s not just some backwards compatibility issue on PS5. The open world areas are impressive in size but getting around takes ages and if you die, you respawn on the complete opposite side of the map, which is beyond frustrating if you are working with teammates and want to group up.
This also happens when you begin the game in split-screen, you are planted at opposite sides of the map and you can barely zoom in on the in-game map to find where you are, let alone pick out any landmarks you can say to meet your co-op buddy at. It’s frankly a total mess and considering it’s been out on Steam for some years now and from what I hear, is still pretty broken…I can’t fathom why it has been given a console release in the first place as I can’t see the huge amount of bugs being fixed in just one patch.
The Verdict
I love sandbox survival games, so Unturned was the ultimate disappointment with its buggy gameplay, broken graphics engine and terrible interface. Avoid.