Wrongworld – Review
Follow Genre: Survival
Developer: Sludj Games
Publisher: Sludj Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC

Wrongworld – Review

Site Score
9.5
Good: Funny and smart random encounters, great and colorful design of the world and characters
Bad: Not much replay value once you encountered and unlocked everything there is (but that will take you quite some time!)
User Score
9.0
(3 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 9.0/10 (3 votes cast)

Wrongworld has now been officially released, and lots of new content has been added since our preview! This game was already very enjoyable, and we really enjoyed playing it. The new additions make the game even more fun, with added events you’ll encounter while exploring, new biomes, new recipes and items, and lots of improvements. Wrongworld has been developed and published by the one-man studio Sludj Games.

Story

The story of Wrongworld is simple, and everything you need to know is shown in the screen you’ll see when a new game world is being generated: Your spaceship exploded while travelling, and you crashed on a strange planet. That’s where you start: at a random location on an island in a strange world. Of course you’ll need to survive here, but you’ll also need to get off this world and get back home! At first you’ll see basic survival recipes in your crafting menu, but as you unlock more complicated technologies by building more advanced crafting stations, you’ll see recipes appearing for a launch platform and different parts of a rocket. For these advances recipes you need some really special items, and the only way to find those, is to explore, travel around, and see what inhabits this strange island.

Graphics

The graphics of this game are low-poly, executed in the most fantastic way possible! The game looks colorful, and the textures used are simple but playful. The sky really looks pretty. The animations are very funny: when your character doesn’t have a tool equipped for chopping trees or mining stone, he’ll smash whatever you’re harvesting with his face. The tree or rock will wobble when you mine it as well, like it is made of rubber. The UI is pretty simple and straightforward, with just your health and hunger bar on screen when you’re walking around. At your inventory screen you’ll also be able to manage your equipment and quick-slots for weapons and tools. Many helpful tooltips and hints have been added since release, which is really useful in informing you on what you need to do and how to progress in the game: for instance, letting you know at the start of the game what you need to do to unlock more crafting recipes.

Sound

This game has constant background music, which changes depending on day or night, whether you are in combat or if an event is happening. The music fits the game, is generally pretty chill and unobtrusive, but will  stay in your head long after you’ve closed the game. And that’s not a bad thing: the music really is nice. The sound effects are fun: you character makes quite cute sounds, and the enemies generally have hilarious sounds!

Gameplay

Wrongworld is a survival game, where you’ll need to try to stay alive on a strange planet with lots of hostile creatures, and keep your belly filled so you don’t starve. Crafting is an important part of the game, and you’ll be able to unlock more recipes as you build new crafting stations and upgrade them.

You have two equipment slots: one for what you carry in your hands (like weapons or tools) and one for what you wear on your body (like a helmet, a jetpack, or running shoes), so you’ll only have two items equipped at once. You’ll need to make a good choice for this: running shoes make you faster, but they don’t offer much armor. A jetpack lets you fly, but doesn’t provide any armor and needs to recharge often. Tools do a bit of extra damage when you use them to fight enemies, but not as much as weapons, and they will break as you use them. Another cool item to wear in your ‘body’ equipment slot is Boxy Mc Boxface, a walking chest which will follow you around if you wear the Boxy item. You can find Boxy somewhere on the island, and he’s very handy to have around on your resource gathering trips. If you de-equip boxy (to wear a helmet for a fight, for instance) he’ll stay put until you equip the box again.

A lot of new things have been added to the game since our preview, two new biomes: alien & radioactive, new monsters, like aliens and radioactive bunnies, new funny and interesting encounters you’ll run into while exploring, new drops and new crafting recipes. Many other gameplay improvements have been made as well, for instance, targeting has become easier: you can target a mob using left shift, to center the camera on that mob and thus make it easier to target the enemy with your attacks. There are also new ways of getting around faster. There are also many helpful tooltips added to the game, letting you know what you’ll need to do to unlock more crafting recipes, and how to target, pick up items, etc.

It used to be very difficult to get enough health in the game: it was easy to lose health, but hard to regain it, since food only restores a little bit of health. Healing potions were a possibility, but it took quite a while before you could craft them: first you’ll need an alchemy table, next you’ll need enough flowers to craft a potion. You can grow flowers, but all of this takes quite a while. Now your health will regenerate when your hunger bar is above 90%. Also, if you eat mysterious goop, you’ll regain 10% health at the cost of 30% hunger.

There are a lot more encounters added to the world, and one of these is a really cool mount: a giant hamster. You’ll need to complete a few tasks in order to get the mount. This mount will help you travel a lot faster around the island. There are also phone booths added to the game: you’ll need to dial a number and then you’ll be teleported to the phone booth with the corresponding number. You can find these scattered around the world (but you do have to repair them first), and you can craft them yourself. Before that the easiest way to get around was launching yourself using a cannon, or flying around with a jet-pack.

There are many other awesome new crafting recipes, and among these are modular house tiles, which you can use to build a house. A house isn’t super useful, but it’s cool to have and you can personalize it in different ways, and you can place all your crafting stations and chests inside of it, if you want to.

Eventually you’ll be able to build a base complete with different crafting stations, and many ways to generate your own resources. You’ll still need to get rocks and ore, but you can grow trees around your base with the nuts all trees drop when you chop them, and you’ll even be able to plant meat, leather, sand and ice to grow a tree out of them and multiply the resources. However, growing trees will take a very long time, so it’s wise to start as early as possible. You can grow random vegetables by using vegetable seeds (you can find these by digging or killing enemies), and these’ll grow faster in a greenhouse and when you water them regularly. You’ll also be able to grow flowers in flower pots: you plant one flower and then you can harvest that same type of flower multiple times from the same pot. Flowers are really important to brew potions, and potions are super useful and needed in a lot of crafting recipes as well.

Your inventory is rather small, but you can build chests to store your stuff, and you can find Boxy to have some more room to carry stuff around while exploring. At the beginning you probably won’t have enough materials for a chest, but you can throw all your items on the ground and pick them up later, if you want to. Items you drop don’t disappear, so dropping them is a great temporal solution if you don’t mind having stuff lying around everywhere. You can now upgrade you inventory as well: you can craft extra slots using a lot of leather. You’ll only be able to add just a few slots using this method, but these slots really help.

As you explore you’ll most likely run into a strange thing pretty quickly. Most of the time you’ll have to figure out yourself what to do to solve that encounter, but the hints are there! And you’ll be able to use logic as well: if you water a dried flower you get seeds, and if you water a smoldering meteor you’ll be able to mine it. If you can’t run away from a mysterious pyramid, try exploring it and see what you can do, and if something is broken, try repairing it and see what happens! Many of these encounters reward useful items: seeds, rare crafting materials, or even special items, for instance glasses that let you spot all resources on the surface, even when blocked by objects!

Wrongworld can be played in different difficulties. Normal difficulty has permadeath, so if you die, you’ll need to generate a whole new world for your next playthrough. However, normal mode does grant you experience based on your progress, which unlocks cool craftable items which will help you in your next game. There’s also an easy mode, which does not have permadeath, so if you die you’ll be able to reload and continue, even all you items will be lootable again. This mode is perfect if you just want an easy time to explore the whole game. However, this mode will not give you any experience.

Conclusion

We were already very enthusiastic about Wrongworld when we tried the game for the preview, but now the game became even better, with a lot of new and interesting encounters added, awesome new enemies (with cute sounds) and very cool things to craft (like the house). The added tooltips are very useful as well! Wrongworld is a fun and colorful survival game, recommended for everyone who likes these types of games, even if they don’t have much experience with survival games.

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Rating: 9.0/10 (3 votes cast)
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Wrongworld - Review, 9.0 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Anmaja


I'm a LARP writer, freelance teacher and everlasting PhD student, and an avid gamer. Nowadays I game mostly on PC, but I love my retro playstation 1 & 2 as well :) I like watching anime, movies and series, and read books & comics whenever I have time!

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