Jade Empire vs The Survivalists
Jade Empire
Jade Empire is a martial arts-themed action RPG where you get the freedom to choose to become either a noble hero or a treacherous villain. The game also provides you with a vast open world to explore and a host of interesting characters to interact with. As you play an aspiring martial arts master, you'll have access to a wide range of nicely-animated fighting moves and styles that you can mix and match. While you increase in your proficiency of the martial arts, your enemies' difficulty level will scale up accoridngly as well, so every battle you engage in will be as challenging as the next despite having better gear and skills.However, being a rather old game, the combat sequences may feel a bit choppy and awkward today. The graphics looks weathered as well. And if you want to play this game for its story, you might want to reconsider. Jade Empire is famous for mainly its cool moves and well-made combat system back then, and having a completely original and immersive plot isn't one of the selling points.
That said, there isn't a lot of oriental-themed RPGs out there and Jade Empire happens to be one of the best ones. If you love martial art games, you might want to try this game out.
The Survivalists
The Survivalists is a survival-themed adventure game focusing on exploring a vast archipelago filled with hidden secrets and treasures as well as mysterious temples and dangerous terrains. The goal here is not only to make a life for yourself by recruiting and training the local monkeys to help with your many mundane chores, but to find a way to crack the mystery shrouding the archipelago and possibly find a way to finally escape!The Survivalists has a sandbox-style, survival-themed gameplay, which means that you’re expected to gather plenty of resources from the environment, use them to build a base of operations… or even multiple outposts and bases… and make sure you’ve got plenty of protection ready for when the local hostile tribesmen attack you, which they do from time to time.
The map here is simply amazing and if you just love exploring, you’ll find the island-hopping experience here pretty satisfying… that is once you’ve got your raft built. Of course, being set in the tropics, there isn’t a whole lot of different biomes to discover, though there are volcanic and swampy areas that are more dangerous than the normal terrain. Even the sea contains dangers and you’ll do well to avoid the ravenous sharks that are looking for an easy meal.
The best and most interesting part about The Survivalists that really help it stands out from all the other generic sandbox survival games is the fact that you can “recruit” monkeys on the island to help you with any mundane tasks. This encompasses all tasks that can be easily replicated by the monkeys. After all, monkey see, monkey do!
That being said, training your monkeys is, unfortunately, also the most frustrating part of the game. Unlike games with macros, you can’t really save the tasks you’ve taught your monkey as general macros that you can then use whenever you need the same tasks done sometime in the future. Instead, every time you need your monkeys to do something, you’ll have to teach it all over again… which frankly speaking is very annoying.
All in all, The Survivalists is as addictively fun as it looks. Being a survival-themed sandbox adventure, there is plenty of stuff you can craft, items to gather, loyal monkeys to train, and bases to set up as you slowly and steadily explore every inch of the massive archipelago. However, the game isn’t without its flaws and I personally think that the game could have made the monkey-training part a bit more convenient and less annoying for the player.