You're bleeding out and limping blindly through the night as another bullet squeals past your ear. You have no choice but to keep running away from the sadistic player gleefully hunting you down, because if you die, then all those hours spent collecting precious items you've crafted and gathered - food, weapons, clothing - will be for nothing. You come to a cliff edge and take a leap of faith into a tiny rock pool below. Your pursuer is gone, so you clamber out, build a fire to ward off the cold, patch up your wounds and cook yourself a fish caught in the rock pool as the sun begins rising on the horizon. You've survived another day. That's the essence of gaming's newest and most popular new genre. Survival games throw you into wild, hostile open-worlds, armed with nothing more than a rock (if that) and the rest is up to you. Death is permanent, resource management is crucial, and each encounter with a creature, zombie or another player feels beautifully intense. If you want to see how you handle yourself in a survival game but find the choice overwhelming, here are 10 varied ones that best exemplify the genre.
10. ARK: Survival Evolved
Humans and dinosaurs cohabiting the planet together. Obviously, it's complete nonsense, but if we made a list of the Top 10 'What If' Scenarios Concocted By Teenagers, then prehistoric man and dinos existing together would make the cut. ARK takes place in a land called 'Ark' (like the title, see), which has a large sci-fi monolith in the middle of it but is otherwise completely wild - and filled with dinosaurs. Surprisingly, surviving as a naked caveman armed only with a rock isn't that hard amidst the dinosaurs, and the more experienced survival gamer will soon be riding aback a velociraptor or flying a pterodactyl, armed with an assault rifle and gunning down mammoths for their meat. But newcomers to the genre are more likely to be banding up with fellow players to take down Triceratops' with spears, or taming giant scorpions and using them to hunt bats. At worst, you'll get stuck in a loop of clubbing dodos to death with rocks before another player does the same to you. But even these pathetic scenarios are entertaining, and ARK's almost childlike vision of man-meets-jurassic-creatures makes for a hugely fun, relatively accessible survival experience.
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
