XIO: Survival

Xio Survival is an open-world sandbox experience. Survive solo or enter the multiplayer-verse that is vast in size with various biomes to explore. Craft, loot, build and trade your way to riches, however, don’t get too comfortable, it can be taken from you quickly.

Game Details

Developer: FOUR
Platforms: Steam
Link: Website, Discord
Release Date: Jun 30, 2022
Status: Early Access

Features

• Explore – Huge, unique and rich environments, offering the freedom to play the game any way you want, featuring 2 unique biomes and worlds up to 2x6K square kilometers in size.
• Craft – Handcraft weapons, melee and cooking recipes.
• Build – Design your fort to include traps, gadgets and defensive positions to survive the undead in a fully destructible and moldable world.
• Cooperate or Compete – Work together to build bases or against each other raiding other player’s bases.
• Create – Unleash your creativity with access to over 800 in-game items, and over 20 unique building blocks that offers infinite possibilities.
• Choose – Play inside the online world with dense forests, towns, lakes, mountains, valleys, roads, airport, farms with 4 unique locations.
• Combat – Encounter zombies, wildlife with unique behaviors and attacks progressing in difficulty to provide an infinite challenge.
• Survive – Experience real hardcore survival that impacts the gameplay in ways that can both challenge and aid in your survival.
• Co-op multiplayer – Play alongside your friends where teamwork is key to your success.

Visuals

Only trailer I can find was on some random ass CDKEYS type YouTube style channel. So just imagine a generic survival title with zombies and things are broken & scattered.

My Thoughts (July 31st, 2022):

A community member from the Hashtag Survival Discord brought this game to my attention a few weeks ago. It was something she had wish listed, something she had seen GE play ages ago and she was passing the title off to me because I encourage all of my community members to send me names they don’t see me talk about or list.

I took a few minutes to glance through the Steam page text- fairly boilerplate zombie survival early access written content- and studied the included screenshots. They raised my SUS alert right off the bat to be honest- they just came across as polished and incredibly empty. The developer and publisher names linked to the page were pretty much dead ends -merch for a game/studio with basically nothing under their belt?- and the 20 dollar out of the box price tag was pretty discouraging. I tossed the game name into YouTube and came up with some pretty interesting hits including some drama involving the developer and content creator BigFryTV, a weird video put out by the development team posted to their account encouraging folks to “ignore the noise” (the terrible reviews??), a very recent video from mid July 2022 showcasing how empty of content the world is, and this video from the developers dated July 27th 2022 showing off a lot of beautiful footage of…empty environments, similar to what you’d see browsing the Unreal or Unity asset stores. So…who knows. There’s supposedly an updated demo being released tomorrow, August 1st, for the Steam Survival Fest- perhaps it’ll be enough to skew my kneejerk Nay into a Yay? For now I’ll leave it neutral, but it doesn’t look good.