Green Hell review

As a generic protagonist, players are thrown in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest without any food or equipment, trying to survive and find their way out. Without any help whatsoever from the outside world, players will need to make do with what they find on their journey in order to build shelters, make tools, and craft weapons for self-defence. Wild animals and tropical sicknesses aren’t your only enemies as your mind will also set traps and play on your fears.

Green Hell is a survival simulator where you are left to your own (virtual) device and need to find and build things in order to survive; you’ll need to build a camp so you can save, you’ll need to find resources such as food and water to avoid dying. While this sounds simple, the game (depending on the difficulty selected, more on that later) will also unleash wild animals and other tribes onto you; if they feel you are a threat, they will follow their instincts and attack.

Obviously, you have nothing, so you have to scour every nook and cranny to stay alive. Given those circumstances, being unable to save without having a shelter built is insanely frustrating. Keep in mind, it’s an open-world game. With no guidance, so finding the exact necessary parts to build shelter let alone finding tools to build it can take a long time depending on where you end up if you go in the wrong direction.

As you’re stuck in the middle of unknown wildlife with basic needs such as eating and drinking for survival, you have to be wary of what you’re eating and drinking. Eat the wrong thing or drink from anywhere will prove costly as you can get sick thus impacting your health status the longer it goes.

One thing is for sure however is that the game looks for a broad audience of gamers thanks to the various difficulty settings; from simply being a tourist trying to survive without any risk of dangerous animals jumping at you to a full-on hardcore virtual experience and with everything in between, even a Custom difficulty setting where you can set it up how you want, the game has a mode for everyone.

Another thing that doesn’t make sense given the game’s survival premise is that while you can’t save properly (there are sporadical auto-saves that are far and few between) until you build a shelter, you can sleep anywhere and pass the time. While I know this is a video game, this is non-sensical if they’re looking to create a simulated setting of being lost in a jungle. I mean would you sleep anywhere in a jungle without shelter?

The biggest nuisance with Green Hell is its tutorial. Normally, a tutorial will help and guide you to figure out and understand a game’s gameplay; from the simplest task such as walking or crafting for example. The problem here is that the tutorial doesn’t help you. At all. It acts as if you’re starting the game and giving you the general how-tos of the game, but it won’t even help out/properly guide you to understand the game’s more complex mechanics such as crafting. Another reason the tutorial is useless; when you launch the story, you’ll re-do the exact same thing. Thankfully, you can skip it at that point.

All of this isn’t help by the clunky UI and inventory management. It’s clear as day that this game was designed for PC in mind without any consideration for possible console ports. You have to move around the cursor with the right joystick to highlight items and use the face buttons to select items from your backpack. Again, the tutorial doesn’t give you much help in terms of how to properly manage your items.

Green Hell’s presentation is fair; it does like it could’ve been more impressive during the seventh generation of home consoles. The forest, overall, looks great, but there plenty of odd glitches and clipping issues here and there; nothing major, but you know it’s there. The in-game fonts are also very small making some things a pain to try and read. Also during the main game, it lags and stutters a lot; the tutorial has no hiccups, but getting into the main game you will come across issues (I played on an Xbox One S). The fonts are also very small and the game lacks any accessibility features that could allow users to have a more enjoyable experience. The score is fittingly haunting during loading screens but in-game you hear the same thing you’d expect when walking around a jungle or forest.

I for one can appreciate what they were trying to accomplish with Green Hell; but the problem is that it’s riddled with issues and things that drag it down. While there’s a handful of difficulty modes that can apply to a broad audience of gamers, the PC-driven UI which was not adapted for controllers, lack of hints/guidance, clunky and cumbersome inventory management, barely readable subtitles/texts makes for a frustrating game. Unless you’re a diehard survival genre aficionados who have hours on end to dedicate to a single game, this will be right up your alley. As for others, with busy lifestyles, the lack of a save anywhere/anytime feature will be a huge turn-off.