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Introduces its own surprises with its variety of gameplay elements | Review - Micro Survivor

19K View2024-01-05

Micro Survivor：Tiny World

6.6

SurvivalStrategyBuilding

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✨Overview
Micro Survivor is a survival adventure game where players shrink to the size of an ant and navigate a harsh, overlooked world filled with "gigantic" bugs and insects. The game combines elements of survival, crafting, base building, MMO Strategy, and turn-based RPG. While currently available on mobile (Android) for the US and Canada, I was able to play outside these regions without the need for a VPN.

🟩Pros
+Diverse gameplay elements: MMO Strategy, Turn-based RPG, Survival Crafting, etc.
+You can actually visit your Shelter in third person
+Impressive visuals and effects that emphasizes the shrunken down premise

🟥Cons
-Little freedom granted to the player in terms of actual exploration, and building
-Performance can be improved and some minor UI bugs

⭐️Score: 8/10

📖Story and Premise

The game draws clear inspiration from the popular title Grounded, both in its looks and concept. However, Micro Survivor introduces its own surprises, and it’s just inaccurate to simply label it as a ripoff or clone. There’s not much story here, and there’s minimal effort invested in providing a clear-cut narrative aside from offering players a basic premise to set the stage for gameplay. The narrative is simply not a strong point.

🎨Visuals and Art

The graphics resemble Grounded, aiming for an aesthetic closer to animated 3D films like A Bug's Life and Antz, with clean and vibrant colors and stylized 3D characters. The depth of field effect, emphasizing the shrunken-down characters and formerly trivial items now turned gigantic, is executed nicely, contributing to the game's impressive visuals.

🎮First Impressions

To start off, I went in this game expecting a game remotely similar to Grounded – a third-person survival crafting game involving gathering materials, crafting tools, building bases, and surviving. However, Micro Survivor offers less of that and more of other things, and the last thing I expected on this game were quick time events, turn based combat, gacha mechanics, and MMO Strategy War elements baked in to it; but they seem to work pretty well, especially for a mobile audience familiar with such systems.

Honestly, the game started weak and I felt largely disconnected from the game at first, It felt like I was just following instructions rather than actively playing. I was directed to click this and that, with little freedom granted to the player in terms of movement, exploration, and building. Eventually, I realized the game wasn't about those expectations.

🎮Gameplay

After a few minutes, Micro Survivor gathered enough steam and surprised me with its plethora of adopted gameplay elements adopted not only from Grounded but also from other genres like City Builders, MMO Strategy, and Turn-based RPGs. The gameplay is actually engaging especially if you are a fan of these genres.

The Shelter serves as your base, allowing you to construct structures and upgrade them, exactly like an MMO Strategy game. Waiting for upgrades occurs in real-time, ranging from seconds to potentially hours or days. Boosts, available through in-app purchases, will expedite this process. Structures have branching prerequisites, with the "Micro Lab" serving as the main anchor and prerequisite for the city-building mechanics, acting as the "Castle."

🌍MMO Strategy with a twist

Of course it’s not a complete MMO Strategy without the overworld map where you can zoom out your view, see other Shelters, join alliances, and interact with elements across the world map with enemies to defeat, insects to capture, resources to extract, and more.

A notable difference from typical MMO Strategy games is the ability to roam around your shelter in third-person view, performing basic survival crafting gameplay elements such as gathering resources. It’s not as deep as games like Grounded or Ark: Survival, but as I said earlier, it’s not that kind of game, despite what the initial impressions will lead you to believe.

You can also directly interact, build, and upgrade your structures here in this third person free roam, instead of playing the game only via the menus. Which is pretty neat, although the placement of buildings are all predetermined and how you build it is automatically done. So there’s really no granular base building like in Grounded or Minecraft where you can customize every single wall or tile.

⚔️Turn-based RPG Combat

Additionally, Micro Survivor incorporates Turn-based RPG elements into its combat mechanics. An adventure mode presents progressively harder chapters and enemies; with challenging and interesting bosses to defeat. While the combat and exploration is mostly automated, it still serves a nice added element to the gameplay. As usual, the most important part of the battles is your team’s overall power level, which can be increased by upgrading your roster of insects, or acquiring new ones via the gacha system.

💵Monetization

Micro Survivor is free-to-play and adopts in-app purchases for boosts, premium currencies, and gacha mechanics. While these purchases can accelerate progress, I did not find these essential for enjoying the game, at least for the first few hours of play.

📊Technical Performance

The game performed adequately on my Snapdragon 888 phone, with occasional frame rate drops but is overall playable with a lot of room for improvement. With how impressive the game looks I was not surprised with the performance. The UI though is still buggy, as it sometimes overlaps with one another especially if you are navigating through it fast enough. Aside from these and minor server connectivity problems, my experience has been generally satisfactory.

⚖️Conclusion

Micro Survivor is clearly inspired by Grounded — and probably the closest experience you can get on mobile, but it’s not simply a clone. It amalgamates various gameplay elements and offers a range of engagement across MMO Strategy, turn-based RPG, and survival crafting genres. Not as deep as any of them, but what it lacks in depth, it compensates for in variety. Overall, it's an appealing journey into a world where survival is measured at ant-scale.

Mentioned games

Micro Survivor：Tiny World

6.6

SurvivalStrategyBuilding

Get