Here is my list for this years top Survival Games of 2022: Undawn, Project Arrival, Haven Star, Lostlight, Don’t Starve: New Home, Tomorrow Online Survival, Lost in Blue, Arena Breakout, Fading City, and Craft of Survival Immortal (HM: Project DX, LifeAfter, Kefir Games)
Top 10 iOS Survival Games in 2022
Undawn
The first survival game of 2022 is Undawn. Made by Tencent, Undawn is designed to be the ultimate survival game of all time, but it has been taking so long to release that many players joke that it will never come. The game is similar to lifeafter, but has an open world which is no longer unique since LifeAfter has switched to an open world. It is designed to be super realistic to where if you fall, you will break your leg or if you need to go to the restroom and ignore it, it may cause you serious problems later on. Unlike Lifeafter, the clothing is realistic for a survival genre which is obviously amazing, but without good skins, it makes me wonder how they plan to make their money. Another difference is that in addition to crafting weapons, you can find them in the world. So overall, it seems to be the most amazing survival game with everything we were wanting, but it has been taking so long that Netease has even come out with their own new Lifeafter before they could release the game, but I will talk about Netease’s new game later in this list.
Project Arrival
The second game on the list is Project Arrival. This game is also similar in nature to Lifeafter, but has a futuristic theme. One of the things that intrigues me the most about this game is within the storyline, Earth is lost which means our survival is set on a different planet. So surviving on this new planet is going to require gathering resources that I’m not intuitively familiar with to fend off enemies that I currently have no concept of. This sounds like survival on a whole new level and gets me really excited. I also think the futuristic theme is a refreshing addition to the survival genre. Especially when you think about creating new futuristic weapons.
Haven Star
The third game is Haven Star. Haven Star is the newest Rust Mobile which is a welcome addition right now because all of the other Mobile games of it’s type are full of hackers. And nothing makes survival harder than getting sniped from further than the game even allows you to see. For those of you who are not familiar with Rust style games, imagine battle royale where you can build incredibly complex bases, respawn if you die, and the island lasts a month long. It is an incredibly addictive game style so it is great that we are getting another one that has not yet been ruined by hackers. Also, Haven Star allows the host a ton of extra options for customization so each island can have drastically different rules. This could make the learning curve more than some mobile gamers would like, but it also greatly increases the replayability of the game which should keep its more advanced players happy.
Lostlight
The fourth game on the list is Lostlight. This game is the first Mobile form of “Escape from Tarkov” and it is fantastically done. The graphics are crisp, the maps are dynamic and fun to get to know, the gameplay is exhilarating and the controls are the best of what mobile gaming has to offer. I played the game in the early beta and I started to play so much that I struggled to find the time to make videos. One of the things that I think Lost Light does really well is balance the amount of real players with enemies on the map allowing a player to truly master a map while also keeping it fresh each time. Also, Lost Light adds a lot of realistic elements true to other survival games like breaking a leg if you jump off a cliff or if someone shoots you there.
Don’t Starve: New Home
The fifth game is Don’t Starve: New Home. I can’t get behind the graphics of this game. I know many of you guys love it and the concept that eating too little kills you, but eating too much slows you down which obviously makes survival difficult is fantastic and refreshing. So I love the concept which is why it is so high on this list, but personally I struggle to get behind the graphics. This newest version of Don’t Starve also introduces a new way to play the game with friends. It offers several new events and a bunch of new interactions set in your own town square where your friends can of course join you. This newest version is also making upgrades to sandbox mode which it seems like the devs are really excited about.
Tomorrow Online Survival
The sixth game is Tomorrow Online Survival. This game is kind of like a 3D version of Last Day on Earth. So you start out with your own area that you can build up, but in order to get the resources to build up your base, you need to travel to new zones and bring them safely back to your base. But unlike LDoE, the zones have actual pvp like Frostborn. And similar to Frostborn, you can team up with friends to go into a zone, but unlike Frostborn, you do not share a base with your friends. And while there is pvp in zones, there is no raiding in the game as of yet which I know will make some of you unhappy, but will probably be a relief to the rest of you.
Lost in Blue
The seventh game is Lost in Blue which is also like a mixture of Last Day on Earth and Frostborn, but takes on the more traditional top down view. When you first start playing this game, it might feel like just a Last Day on Earth with better graphics and a storyline, but as you get more advanced in the game, it does have at least 2 forms of pvp events. In fact, you can have over 50 players in one clan. Now the pvp arenas seem to be generally small samples of players right now and the skills don’t have a lot of crowd control so team pvp lacks some dynamacy, but it is still awesome that they are able to implement so much into a top down game so I wanted to make sure the game made it to this list.
Arena Breakout
The eighth game on the list is Arena Breakout. This game is Tencent’s approach to creating an Escape from Tarkov type mobile game. This is not a surprise to many of us. The genre is hot right now and there are very few mobile iterations of the game style. Normally I would put Tencent’s game above Netease because it is a bigger company with more resources, but since Netease was able to launch Lostlight first and do a good job with it, I think it will perform better. That being said, Arena Breakout has some things they will be bringing to the table that no game has ever done before. The biggest example of this is their injury system which they claim will be on a scale that has never been seen on mobile gaming. In addition to featuring physical details extensively, it will display and mimic acute physical behaviors like pain and hunger. There will also be separate injury systems for each body part and damage taken will be shown exclusively on the part that has been hit or affected. This is such an incredible attention to detail and unprecedented for mobile gaming. With Tencents slowness to release games, I have some concerns about it coming out this year, but hopefully they will be able to stay on schedule.
Fading City
The ninth game on the list is Fading City. This game has been referred to by many as Lifeafter 2.0 because it is made by the same developer, Netease, but now that the Beta was released last week, players are seeing a resemblance to Resident Evil 5. Many Lifeafter fans believe the game is destined to answer all the problems of Lifeafter. Mainly reducing the grind loads and p2w advantages allowing players to keep up without feeling like the game is a part-time job. And while there is definitely some truth to these ideas, I think a large part of the reason is simply because Netease likes to create lots of games. They have over 900 games on Google play and you will notice that lifeafter is one of their most successful games still getting more that a million downloads a month just on the Android platform. On top of all that, the storyline of Fading City seems to be significantly improved over that of LifeAfter.
Craft of Survival Immortal
The last game on the list is Craft of Survival Immortal. This game is the newest top down survival game and it has several things going for it that could make it explode. The first one is the storyline which is masterfully interwoven into the game. Top down survival games with a strong interwoven story line have been performing very well. The latest of which was Kefir’s Cyberika which experienced a huge boost of downloads and continues to do well. It doesn’t really seem to make any money, but it definitely grows a lot! The second thing this game has going for it is that players’ attacks and skills are not target focused, but rather do damage to an area or direction. This is a game mechanic unique to the genre and has a lot of players really excited especially in its implications for multiplayer. Unfortunately, the devs stated two months ago that they are postponing their efforts to implement PvP and the arena which is already on the game map which was extremely disappointing to me personally, but nevertheless, I think this game will do well.
Honorable mentions
Ok, so those are the top 10 survival games of 2022, but I do have 3 honorable mentions.
The first honorable mention is Project DX
his game is truly exciting but it will not be coming out this year. If you want to know more, I explain why it is not coming out yet in my video on the top 10 MMOs of 2022.
Life After
The second honorable mention is LifeAfter which is currently the most downloaded survival game on Android. Lifeafter is amazing and they keep improving the game, but the game does not have hype particular to 2022. This is not a bad thing. It just means it has become a staple of mobile gaming.
Last Day on Earth & Frostborn
The third honorable mention is Kefir’s series of top down games with Last Day on Earth being the classic version and Frostborn being the most advanced version. Those of you who watched my top 10 mobile games of 2022 know that I put Frostborn on that list so it would make sense for me to put it here and did think Frostborn might get a lot of new hype in 2022 because they were adding an event that fulfilled most of what we asked for, but then after that video was released, the event’s matchmaking was revealed to not match 4 man teams with other 4 man teams, but rather 4 man teams with solo players and solo players with 4 man teams. I did not dream a matchmaking system could even be created so poorly which is why I put it on the list, but now that I know it can and does exist, it is currently not on my list.
