Palworld
Two and a half years after the meme that ate January 2024, Palworld's 1.0 finishes the job — a survival sandbox whose real subject is labour, with 72 more Pals, a level-80 ceiling and two new regions bolted onto the top of it.
8.5 / 10
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Survival reviews
6 Survival games reviewed and scored, best first.
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6 reviews
Dune: Awakening
A survival MMO that actually earns its licence — stillsuits, spice addiction and sandworms all function as real systems — held back by an endgame that still leans too hard on forced PvP for players who came for the desert, not the fight.
7.5 / 10
The Last Stand
A 2007 Newgrounds upload built by a first-time Flash coder as a learning exercise, The Last Stand turned a $16,000 Armor Games contest win into a five-game franchise and a 2021 paid Steam remaster — while the original 20-day siege underneath it stays a stiff, repetitive resource-allocation puzzle that mostly matters for what it started.
6.5 / 10
Thing-Thing Arena
A February 2006 spinoff Diseased Productions built to fix a survival mode it thought Thing-Thing 2 got wrong — a wave-based, ragdoll-gore arena shooter with per-mode online high scores, never intended to be the series' next real chapter and honest about saying so.
6.5 / 10
Boxhead: 2Play
A solo Bullfrog veteran's fourth entry in his own top-down zombie-shooter series added the one feature its title promises — local two-player co-op and deathmatch — to an arsenal of ten weapons across eighteen rooms, and that addition is close to the whole review, because almost everything else about it is the same arena-survival loop the series had already run three times before.
6 / 10
Frantic 2
A free 2009 bullet-hell shmup from the Kongregate developer known only as PolymerRabbit — three episodes, thirty bosses and five customisable ships stacked on top of a genuinely clever "scrape the bullet stream for score" mechanic that the game itself never bothers to explain, wrapped in a bullet-vs-powerup colour clash players were still complaining about a decade and a half later.
6 / 10