Sent to find a missing billionaire on a remote island, you find yourself in a cannibal-infested hellscape. Craft, build, and struggle to survive, alone or with friends, in this terrifying new open-world survival horror simulator.
~ Steam’s Sons of The Forest description
Summary
A new island, new monsters, new mystery, same solid foundation. Sons of The Forest is a great improvement to the first game.
The start of the game and the premise are identical, but this time you get a new crafting and building system, as well as changing seasons. This is most likely just the start if we consider the progress made in The Forest while in Early Access.
According to the devs, we can expect the game to stay in EA for 6-8 months which leaves lots of time for new content. As of now, the map is way too big for the amount of content it has. If you go to the online map (caution spoilers) you can see that half of the map is very empty. I’d guess that is where new content will end up.
Building and crafting have had some great changes and the exploration is promising. After 16 hours of playtime with a few friends, it definitely has been lots of fun, and we still have a few more hours before we check all the caves/secrets that are currently in the game. But I’m already excited about future updates!
Analysis
Before we jump into a more in-depth review, I want to give some context: I’ve played it on PC for almost 16 hours over 3 days with some friends on the normal difficulty. I played the first game for almost 70 hours so I have a pretty good understanding of its core mechanics.
Crafting and Inventory
Starting with crafting, it’s an interesting system where you join items together to craft something like the previous game. However, you need to manually select all the items in your inventory. While the UI/UX of it is new and fresh it can get old very quickly due to the fact that you don’t have the option to auto-select all the items of a recipe, or even craft multiple items at once.
Your inventory gets crowded as you progress and you need to look around to see all of your items, making it inconvenient to use some of the items.
Still, on the topic of the inventory, we don’t have hotkeys for specific items. You’ll have a backpack to pull out at any time by holding the inventory key. You can assign items to slots in the backpack for easier access, but you won’t be able to quickly swap between weapons while fighting.
Combat
The combat is a bit junky regarding hitboxes and animation. I personally like the overall junky feel of it, that’s one of the core parts of The Forest for me, as an early access player on the first game.
The AI is definitely improved upon but still could use more work. The enemies climb on random rocks just to look at you and then come back down while in combat. Sometimes they start running away then stop and start looking around.
The enemies while they move in groups and live in the same camp have no teamwork whatsoever. Would be amazing to see improvements in that aspect, and have multiple enemies fight you together.
The different types of enemies make combat fun, but playing with friends makes it easy to defeat enemies by doing some teamwork. The new firearms and explosives bring an easy way to kill large groups of enemies. I hope they introduce some very strong enemies that will end up forcing us to use them…
Building
The building system was revamped from the previous game, where now you have 2 complementary types. The old one with blueprints that you fill in the materials to complete. And a new one that you place each item individually in the world. I believe this is a great change and has a very high potential but for now, it’s still in an early phase, especially regarding the snapping feature.
It’s missing lots of the previous game’s buildings, like traps and decorations. Not sure why that is, but I hope they either reintroduce them or create new similar ones.
You’ll get an NPC friend, named Kelvin, that crashed on the island with you. He is very useful for building, as he can clear out areas, or grab some items at your request.
Exploration
Exploration is a big part of the game and overall very interesting at least in the first few hours. However, the lack of guidance makes you go back and forth until you have the necessary equipment to progress in certain interest points. Looking at you Shovel…
With the lack of guidance, you end up exploring on your own… Some people will do it in the correct order, while others will waste hours walking around. Some clues to guide the player would be a welcome new feature.
One of my pet peeves is that some places only unlock if you’ve done a specific action before. Because of that, you need to go back to previous caves to check if a door is now opened. Requiring a specific item to progress is perfectly fine, but having you explore one place so that a door in another place opens is poor design.
The new map/GPS item needs a lot of work. You don’t have a compass, so good luck trying to explain to your friends the direction you want to go… The map should update the places you visit as well as have a toggle for your “home” locations. There’s a waypoint system using GPS locators but it wasn’t working well in multiplayer so we gave up on it.
We ended up not needing to hunt since we always found lots of resources, and Kelvin is the best fisherman in the world. Still, the wildlife was a lot better than what I remember in The Forest regarding its AI. I would like it if the game was to provide a lot fewer food resources and made you hunt/fish more.
Visual and sounds
The visuals are great, but the game isn’t very optimized, which was expected. The animations, like the crafting ones, look really nice but not as smooth as I’d hoped, but this could be tied to the optimization problem…
The new changing season system brings some dynamism to the graphics. Really enjoyed the snow and the frozen lakes were a very nice addition. The design of the enemies is still great with very unique designs. I hope they introduce even more variety as it was always a good experience finding new enemies.
Sound-wise I found it to be alright. It has some nice atmospheric sounds in the forest, and the building and crafting sounds are also decent. Sounds made by my friends seem to be coming from different directions sometimes, especially gunshots.
Expectations for future updates
I personally love to play games in early access where devs provide regular updates, both content and bug fixes. Endnight did a great job in The Forest so I’m hopeful for this one as well.
In addition to bug fixes and improvements on balance and core gameplay, we plan to add more items, more things you can 3d print, more to build and discover, as well as adding additional game mechanics and lore.
Endnight’s answer to “How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?”
I’m very curious as to what new mechanics they’ll introduce and hope to get more buildings and decorations.
Some of the enemies have ranged attacks by throwing rocks at you but I’d love to see archers! Or even some enemies that use weapons – maybe some “normal” people could still be alive…
Conclusion
Having said all this, I believe Sons of The Forest is in a great place for the Early Access release. I’ll definitely continue to play as new updates come out.
It is incredibly fun with friends and 29€ seems to be a fair price. The price isn’t planned to change, so if you’re reluctant, just wait to see what the next updates bring. You can always follow the game on steam.
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