Unturned

Unturned
Developer(s)	Smartly Dressed Games
Publisher(s)	Smartly Dressed Games
Designer(s)	Nelson Sexton
Programmer(s)	Nelson Sexton
Artist(s)	Nelson Sexton
Engine	Unity
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows, MAC OS X, Linux
Release	Windows, MAC OS X'Linux
Genre(s)	Survival
Mode(s)	Singleplayer, Multiplayer

Unturned is an indie, free-to-play, zombie-themed survival game designed and published by Nelson Sexton, the owner and founder of Smartly Dressed Games. It became one of the best rated games in the steam store as of December 2016.

Gameplay

Unturned features several different gamemodes, all of which consist of the same basic concept of zombie survival.

Survival (Singleplayer)

The game starts by dropping the player off on a map of their choice. (Prince Edward Island (PEI), Yukon, Washington, Russia, or a custom one made by the community, or the player.) With nothing in their possession, players must find weapons to survive against zombies, as well as find supplies to keep them from dying of starvation, thirst, disease, or in the case of Yukon and other winter maps, cold.

Survival (Multiplayer)

Unturned's multiplayer survival mode is similar to its singleplayer survival mode, with a few differences. The biggest difference between the singleplayer and multiplayer modes, as the name implies, is that multiplayer mode allows multiple players to play together on the same map. Players can choose to team up to defend against the randomly spawning zombies, and to collect items, or players can choose to battle each other, so that they do not have to share the items.

Arena (Multiplayer)

Arena mode is a gamemode in Unturned that is only available to play in multiplayer. The gamemode spawns players in a central spawn point in the middle of a map, where players run to collect items, such as medical supplies, weapons, and ammo from the central point, and then either spread out to the edges and hide, or stay in the center and battle each other. The point of the arena gamemode is to be the last person alive at the end. There is also a map border which contracts and kills all of the players outside of it, to force players into the center of the map to battle, to prevent the game from going on for too long.

Hardcore (Singleplayer)

Hardcore mode was a gamemode in Unturned version 2.0. It was very similar to the singleplayer survival gamemode on Hard difficulty, but had a variety of changes, including some of the items being removed, and various things were made more diffucult.

Difficulty Levels

Unturned has three difficulty levels. In the first difficulty level, Easy, loot spawns are 50% greater than the game's next difficulty setting, Normal. In Normal difficulty, there are standard spawn rates of items and vehicles. In the third difficulty, known as Hard, loot spawns are decreased, and zombies do more damage to the player.

Downloadable Content (DLC)

With the $4.99 Gold DLC, special cosmetic options for the character and interface are unlocked. As the player progresses through the game, they gain experience points from killing zombies or gathering resources which can then be used for boosts and an expansive crafting menu. These skills can affect simple things, such as doing more with either a melee weapon or ranged weapon, to increasing vitality or lowering the rate at which the player dehydrates or starves or their ability of farming or cooking over a fire to not starve. Random Boosts are somewhat random abilities, such as an increased throwing range, or triggering a velocity boost on corpses.

Unturned also includes a multiplayer gamemode. Server owners may modify the server settings, some of which are shared with single-player, while other settings are exclusive to the game-mode. These include the enabling or disabling the ability to have player versus player combat, allowing players to sync their character data between servers, putting up server plugins such as shops, or kits, and setting a maximum capacity for players. While server admins can kick/ban abusive players. Ports were added for private server hosting.

Unturned once featured a Gamemode called "Horde" that spawns the player with one gun and 3 magazines to survive waves of zombies, akin to Call of Duty Zombies. While there are no official Horde maps, a lot of maps featured this Gamemode on the Steam Workshop. As of 2016, this has been removed because of its complications.

One of Unturned's Gamemodes, Arena, puts players against each other in a Battle Royale type of scenario where they must scavenge for weapons and supplies and continue moving to the specified spot where the "barrier" closes in.

Development

Unturned was developed by Nelson Sexton, also known as SDGNelson (in Steam) and DeadzoneZackZak (Roblox) , an eighteen-year-old from Canada. Sexton started his career with Roblox development, creating two of the most popular games on Roblox, known as BATTLEFIELD and DEADZONE. DEADZONE, a game in Roblox, is a zombie-survival game, similar to Unturned. DEADZONE is no longer playable in Roblox due to the game being "Exploited", making other users copy the game. When Nelson saw this, he gave up on ROBLOX and starting to work on Unturned. Unturned was originally listed under Steam Greenlight as Unturned 2.0 and was rated #3 of all Greenlight games. It was successfully Greenlit on the 28th of May 2014 and is now available on Steam. The game is continually being updated to add more items, features and mechanics, as well as fixing current ones that do not function as intended. The game has seen drastic changes in this preview branch such as graphical improvements, support for user-created content on Steam Workshop, dedicated servers, and much more. Currently, updates and new item releases are scheduled every Friday.

The most recent map, "Russia", was the first time another person besides Nelson Sexton was credited for work on something in the game. Credit was given to "Justin 'Gamez2much' Morton" and "Mitch 'Sketches' Wheaton" for work on the map itself, "Alex 'Rain' Stoyanov" for creating most of the new vehicles, and "Amanda 'Mooki2much' Hubler" for work on structures and objects.

On November 22nd 2016, Nelson created a post titled "Postcard from Hawaii" on the official blog for his company "Smartly Dressed Games". He stated that a team of community mappers are working on a new Hawaii map. According to the blog post, the four community mappers are "Rain, Spyjack, Mooki2much and Gamez2much".

Steam Community Market and Official Store (Unturned Stockpile)

Players are able to buy and sell cosmetic items on the Steam Community Market, and are able to buy cosmetic items, such as Skins for weapons directly from the creator of Unturned using its official store, Unturned Stockpile.

Reception

Unturned became one of the best rated games in the steam store as of December 2016.

On July 17, 2014, PC Gamer published a review of the game saying that while "Unturned has few real ideas on its own" it is a simple, accessible survival simulator that one may enjoy provided they can "stomach the low production values"; however, the author adds that with Nelson constantly updating the game, it is expected that many more features may be added.

See also

• List of zombie video games