A few years back I was able to play through all of How To Survive - A 3rd person survival action game based on several tiered islands. As you slay zombies, search for food, water and resources... you can craft a bunch of neat gear and weapons. The goal was to survive night & day and leave the island alive.

The game ran well in PlayOnLinux with Wine and only a few minor issues, but I was still able to play through the entire campaign cooperatively with my wife.



How To Survive 2 is a promising sequel that ultimately fails. From the beginning it didn't play in PlayOnLinux with Wine or even Proton. There were reports of an anti-cheat in place that was not compatible with Wine. Sure enough it didn't work in Proton either. So I would check back every few months to see if it was fixed or some kind of good result. One day it happened, someone posted on protondb.com that How To Survive was now working Proton. Gave it a try and yes, it runs! I was not able to play co-op on two computers, but my wife was able to use my Xbox controller and do couch co-op. It runs great!

Unfortunately, most of the unique features in the first one didn't exist. You are now in a forest and have to load other maps to play through cities, jungles and farms. Many times you are sent to the same map to do another quest so there is some repetitive locations and of course... zombies. You will still find the custom fatalities when pressing "F" on a zombie after a few blows... those are quite satisfying and save some ammo. The maps and weather effects are beautiful too.

Where HTS2 fails is nourishment, auto-leveling minions and farm quests. In the beginning we leveled up quickly and focused on lowering our hunger/thirst needs, because it was hard to find food or water. We followed the tutorials to start building our camp but quickly found that our characters were dying of thirst and hunger which makes slower at fighting. Aiming, slashing and even running slow down as punishment for malnourishment. We scoured the entire jungle looking for food and water... nothing. There are some really fast bunnies running around, but no chance of hunting without traps. After almost giving up, we searched online and the only REAL source of water is re-visiting the city map and gathering bottles of water. No wells, no way to boil sea water... nothing. Just playing the same old map over and over....



As you level up the environments level up with you in order to keep some sense of difficulty... WOW! Too difficult! As we search desperately for food, wood and water... we keep getting gouged by zombie bunnies, super fast fat zombie (who explode) and random slaps from peon zombies that avoided your attack. You even find that the city map levels up as well. So while we are searching only for water and food to store, we are getting slayed by leveled up minions. Frustration kicks in again.

At the point of quitting again, I decide to stick with it, use the repetitive workaround for water/food and see if the game starts to get better. Nope. We get stuck in a stupid Farm quest where you have to lead pigs into a friggin barn by running just close enough for them to chase you. Not to mention if they run into you, your character falls down and looses health. I seriously tried this quest several times and we couldn't do it. We ignored this quest and hoped for something better from anther NCP. Well, there is a challenge that has to be completed before you can level up your camp to a certain point. Guess what??? The challenge map is on a stupid farm and you have to lead these annoying zombie Turkeys into a corral. They just keep coming and coming with no direction on where to lead them. Dead again.

We gave up! That was neither challenging or fun. Not to mention many of the quests do not make any sense and there is no compass or direction on how to get to locations. We just run around in a hurry because our hunger/water needs are dropping. Even after leveling up and increasing damage... we'd be pummeled by a small (yes small) horde of zombies.

I don't know what they were thinking, but I will never play How To Survive 2 again. The game is not balanced correctly and we wasted so much time compensating for it. Not fun... not even slightly entertaining.