Sergey Noskov, the indie developer behind In Rays of Light and 7th Sector is back with their new walking sim “survival horror” (as it’s said to be on Steam) post-apocalyptic game 35MM. I would like to thank the Developer and publisher Sometimes You for the review opportunity.
35MM takes place in Russia after a global Pandemic wiped out most the of population. The story follows two travelers who are wandering the Russian countryside making their way towards a city where our main character lives.
The controls in 35MM are a bit tricky and seem to now be meant for controllers, and don’t seem to respond well at times, especially during combat. The game was also classified as an FPS/Shooter, but the combat mechanics in the game leaves a lot to be desired as you can’t aim, and enemies have a lot more health than you. There are moments you have to do button mashing but most of the time it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do with the buttons, whether you’re supposed to keep tapping them or just press it once and that’s it, and this seems to change every time it comes up.
The pacing of the story really kills the game for me, for the first half of the game you are literally walking, with your travel buddy, not talking, for several minutes. when you get an objective, there’s no prompt to tell you what that objective is in the hub, sometimes these objectives are given through dialogue but the subtitles won’t work (the spoken language in the game is Russian making the use of subtitles vital).
The game touts that there are multiple endings depending on what the main character does which I picked up right away that when the character does something positive the screen lightly flashes and a pleasant chord is sounded, much like in the Metro games which part of me feels this game is kind of trying to mimic.
Overall my experience with 35MM was not a good one. I put in some time playing it hoping it would eventually pick up and get better as the start of the game set off a really bad tone with how boring it was, sadly it didn’t improve. On my scale of 1-10 35MM is a 4 as for a walking sim it was slower than a mall walker, the combat mechanics was terrible, buggy controls and environment, and for the game being called 35MM the 35mm camera that the character has and can use really has no purpose in the game or serves anything important to the character’s development as it’s just used for photo mode.
If you really want to try this out for yourself, the game will come out on March 2nd for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
