Survivors 2

In Brief
This is the 41st game we've received from Jurij since late August last year. Virtually all of them are similar to today's giveaway i.e. first person arena shooters, apart from the location/environments, various assets and a few changes to the game mechanics with respect to weapon selection etc. That said the developer did give away (via Falcoware) a platformer called Planet Explorer on the 30th March 21.

You can see a couple of video's of Survivors 2 game play HERE & HERE.

The Game
The Falcoware installer has been removed from the game, so there are no in game adverts when you boot the game up, and your browser will not be redirected to Falcoware's site when you close the game down apart from when the game has finished installing. The four non-game shortcuts that are installed to the desktop are internet shortcuts and do not affect your system. They can be deleted with no effect on the game. I've provided a Virus scan report below that shows the game to be free of any malware.

The game is based around the Unity engine and is a first person shooter that give you a selection of several weapons, which can be accessed via the mouse wheel or the number keys. You can also pick up grenades to supplement the ones you were provided with by default. Press G to throw a grenade.

Game play is similar most of Jurij's previous giveaways, where you explore and attempt to survive a single arena killing any soldier you see (previous games were usually zombie or monster based with the occasional robot thrown in). Once you've figured out where all the ammo and health packs spawn, it's easy enough to survive until you get bored. Game play is rather tedious after several minutes of wandering around the same environment with little in the way of a real challenge or variation in the game that would normally keep a person interested in carrying on or replaying the game.

Unfortunately there are also some bugs in the game where you get stuck in certain places, usually where there are rocky outcrops against buildings. Also, with this game there are a lot more blind ends that makes it harder to navigate through the arena like level. Key bindings are not editable. To see a list of all the key bindings available for this game press the F1 key. For example, movement = WASD or the arrow keys, crouching = L.ctrl, leaning left or right around corners = Q & E respectively, going prone = X, melee attack = V, camera mode = C or Mouse button 3 etc. You can see the rest of the key bindings in the first image below

Ammo can be picked up when found; usually next to soldiers you've killed or by picking up their dropped weapons. To pick these as well as health packs and grenades, place your cursor over the item; when a hand appears, press the F button. I'm not sure if you can increase your health above the initial 100 health like you can in some of Jurij's games. Each health pack gives you a 25 point boost. So far I've not been able to find a health pack until I've already lost more than what a pack would give. In most of the previous games of this type from Jurij, you've been able to boost your health up to a maximum of 200.

Conclusion:
This is a game that I would recommend saving for coffee breaks or short in-between more interesting game sessions only, otherwise you may find game play becomes very repetitive and tedious. If you don't have many FPS/zombie games, it's probably worth downloading, but don't expect ArmA, Battlefield, Men of Honor or Call of Duty graphics. Personally I have hundreds of first/third person shooters, all of which (IMO) are far superior to this one; for example, my Battlefield 2 collection (a game approaching 16 years old) has more fluid graphics, better weapons, an open world aspect with three sizes of map to explore, plus different modes of game play i.e. multiplayer and cooperative modes on top of the single player game plus literally hundreds of custom made maps on top of the large selection of vanilla maps originally released with the game. Also, the AI is far superior; you can use a fan made single player mod called 'Bot Changer' that enables you to adjust the 'intelligence ' of bots (from 1 to 10) as well as the number spawning on the map from 16 (8 per side including the human player) to 128 bots (the more bots you spawn, the more memory resources are used. Larger numbers give a very effective battlefield experience; especially if you use the body stay mod which leaves the battlefields strews with dead bodies (though this can also use up significant amounts of memory, so is only suitable for computers with a decent amount of Graphic and Sys RAM available. I have 32 GB sys RAM and 12GB of gRAM and am able to run the game effectively with 128 bots. My old dual core system with 1GB of gRAM from 15 years ago could only run a max of 64 bots and using the body stay mod would soon grind the game to a halt, especially if you were in a lengthy battle.

With over 1 terabyte of additional mods and extra maps to explore, all of which are free, you'd get hundreds of hours worth of no repeatable game play experience. In fact you can get a free version of Battlefield 2 now from a couple of the better known mod sites such as Project Reality and possibly the Forgotten Hope 2 mod. Or check it out via the following web site HERE. EA games even gave away the first in the Battlefield series (Battlefield 1942) several years ago via their Origin client.

Other free games worth adding to your game library
Today is your last chance to get last weeks free games from Epic Games; these include three games; i.e. Deponia: The Complete Journey, a comedic point and click adventure game. Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, a point and click visual novel with a medieval anime feel to it, and The First Tree, a atmospheric walking simulator., all of which you'll find HERE; the combined cost of these three games would set you back over £60/$84/€70. From later today i.e. 4pm UK time) we will be getting two more games; the excellent Alien: Isolation, A first person psychological/survival horror game based on the Alien movie franchise and set in an atmosphere of constant dread and mortal danger & Hand of Fate 2, is an RPG roguelike deck builder card game; Master a living board game of infinitely re-playable quests - unlock new cards, build your adventure, then defeat your foes in brutal third person real-time combat! (combined cost of both games is over £50/$70/€58).

Please see Delenn's threads for other Steam and Non Steam freebies HERE and HERE respectively. There won't be new freebies added every week from these sections apart from the Epic games, but it is worth checking them regularly for details of any games going for free. Delenn usually posts details when a game is being offered free for a temporary period. These include games from Good Old Games (all DRM free), Ubisoft's uPlay client, Valves Steam client, EA Games Origin client and other indie developers.

You'll find hundreds of freeware games of all arcade and indie genres on Itch.io and Caimans Games as well as other sources. Please do check out the game discussion forums for older posts HERE (the sticky section is useful). Many of the earlier posts may be out of date with respect to the links I and others have provided to the free games; however, you only need to know the name of the game to find most of them via other sources. Many of those games from 2008 to around 2017 were posted as part of a project to supplement the lack of weekday games when the game giveaway went to weekend only games around Easter 2008 (mainly instigated due to the financial crisis of 2008) until November 2018 when Falcoware stepped into the weekday slot; however, from around 2015 onwards we did start to get the occasional Steam key for various games offered as limited giveaways, with a restriction on the number of keys available (anywhere from 25 to 2000+). These included over 60 decent AAA games and indie arcade games ; for example some of the better AAA games included , lucky Warhammer: Vermintide 1 & 2 plus DLC for version 2; Dreadlands, Mount & Blade: Warband, Immortal Unchained and Conan Exiles.

I've not posted details of any Indie Gala freebies since my older computer went on the Fritz back in October last year. Since then Indie Gala have added quite a few more free games, some of which are definitely worth downloading. You can find the latest freebies HERE and their showcase list, which includes all the freebies still current; (many of which have been included for a couple of years now) HERE.

It’s worth adding these links to your favorites and checking regularly for available freebies. Most are only free for a specific time. If you miss the deadline you’ll miss out. Once added to your account, they are yours to keep. :)

Notes on Security
I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game and it found zero hits from 59 antimalware engines. The downloaded executable may include some low level adware that only opens your browser to Falcowares home page after the game has installed, but does not inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to Falcowares home page it earns them some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free. You can see the results of the scan via the following link:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/1d3e8f9b7b83fb36278b21bf26ec6828d08cf3e35783905fb6508edb1f21e6a5/detection