Bite Sized Reviews: Taora Survival

Last year, I played a lot of State of Decay 2.

This zombie survival game has been through the wars. I remember its appalling technical state in 2020, but after years of content updates State of Decay 2 has become one of my favorite sandbox RPGs to play. There’s just something satisfying about building my little community in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

Taora Survival launched at the end of May, and it feels like a State of Decay game. As soon as I discovered it, I knew I had to give it a shot. Big thanks to the developers Tulpar Games for granting me a review code to check the game out! It is out in Early Access for a base price of £11.79/$12.59, with a 10% discount until June 6th. By the time this goes live that discount might not be available, but that is still a very reasonable price tag. While it needs a lot of work with optimization and bug fixing, it is an enjoyable enough time to recommend.

The closest indie title I can compare Taora Survival to is Survivalist: Invisible Strain. That was another game I played a lot of in 2023. As for what to expect, we’ve got all the parts of a zombie survival game. We’ve seen this throughout the genre. You collect resources, construct buildings, craft items, and survive the zombie apocalypse. It’s not winning any prizes on the creativity front, but it’s decent enough. It’s difficult to think of how to describe Taora’s gameplay without feeling like I’ve rehashed it a thousand times. We know what zombie survival games are like. It’s an early-access game with a core gameplay loop already present. The developer plans to add more content and quests throughout its development.

The biggest roadblock preventing me from playing it more is the performance. I already experienced a lot of bugs, like my character’s equipment randomly vanishing, dying without any indication of what happened, and a couple of hard crashes. My laptop is not high-end by 2024 standards, but it meets the recommended requirements for the game. Even on the lowest settings, I experienced a ton of frame drops. That might be because of the old graphics card in this laptop, but I’ve played heavier games that had fewer performance issues than this. Optimization is something Taora Survival desperately needs. After one crash I found that my 8-hour save had been deleted, and Steam was unable to recover the file. A tad unfortunate.

With this in mind, Taora Survival needs a lot of work. However, that is what Early Access is for. While my technical experience with the game left a lot to be desired, I see the potential in this game. It carries a low price tag and there’s more than enough meat in this zombie sandwich to enjoy yourself. I would recommend having a more powerful rig than my old-man laptop. As long as Tulpar Games is committed to fixing the bugs and optimizing the game, we could be onto something special.