REVIEW: Green Hell - PS4

Review by GamingCouchPotato.co.uk Staff

Green Hell is an open world survival game from developers Creepy Jar.

Played from a first-person perspective, you play as a researcher called Jake Higgins, you find yourself in the jungle in the amazon, your partner Mia left to visit a tribe in the jungle, she is a linguist and decided to make first contact with a tribe known as the Yabahuca. Now she is gone, you are alone, and you need to not only find her, but you need to survive.

And this is the main idea of the game, survival. You will start off by learning how to do simple things, like building and starting a camp fire. You will need to learn how to craft items by collecting the raw materials, and combining them. But of course, things are a bit more complicated than that, you need to keep an eye on your health, not just physical but mental. As the environment around you changes, so will your need to build camps, find places to sleep. Everything you do matters. Find yourself thirsty and you decide to drink some water from a river, great if the water is clean, not so great if it is dirty. You will only make yourself more ill.

Try and find and collect food, but what happens if you eat an unknown mushroom? Might be ok, might give you hallucinations, might make you sick. As you navigate through all of these problems, you will also need solutions, cut your arm and maybe use ants to close the wound, get an infection and use maggots to clean the wound. You see you will need to use such tricks, as bandages and medicine need to time to make. Luckily your notebook will help you keep track of things and you will slowly learn from your mistakes. And then there are the animals, think snakes, spiders and scorpions, as well as larger animals you can try to kill to eat. You might even find yourself in a fight with a native tribesman.

Your watch will be a major benefit to your survival, it helps you keep track of your vitals, as well as acting as a navigation tool, you will also make good use of a map that you will find.

As you do try to survive, trial and error really does become your friend. You will soon learn what does work and what doesn't. 

With all that, the question then remains, is the game any good?

As survival games go, Green Hell is very detailed, and very tough, there is no hand holding here. Don't waste your time with the tutorial, as it is the same as if you just start the story mode. Which seems very strange. There is also a major issue that you cannot easily save your progress. You can only save when in a camp. So, if you are playing and need to stop quickly, you can't, you have to build or find a camp, and then save. You will find yourself easily losing a lot of progress due to this.

There are 7 extra challenges you can attempt, these are away from the story mode, and are stand-alone challenges. When you have the main idea of how to play, it is worth playing the challenges to really help you figure out how to survive, the challenges include simple things like finding a camp and starting a fire, or building a raft, or killing and cooking an animal etc.

The difficulty is pretty high in the game, and you might find yourself putting the game on the easiest setting on a first playthrough, but as mentioned earlier there is no hand holding here, early help and instructions soon disappear, and you really do need to figure out much on your own, this will put off newbies to the genre. Finish the game on the easiest setting and you will want to replay on a harder setting using the knowledge you have gained.

The Good

The game is beautiful, and despite the odd graphical glitch, everything looks and plays wonderfully. Any experienced survival game fan should feel right at home.

The Bad

This is not a game for newbies to the genre, it is tough, the controls at time feel a bit clunky, especially navigating the backpack.

Overall

For experienced survival game players, you will find yourself enjoying this game, the story and the challenges are all very rewarding. For newbies, this game is tough, really tough, with the clunky controls, you might find yourself put off early on, which is a shame, because if you stick with it, the game has a lot to offer.

I score Green Hell on PS4 a fair 7/10

Review by GamingCouchPotato.co.uk Staff