Hold Your Own

Hold Your Own was seemingly just another game in the open-world sandbox survival-crafting genre that had been raining down on PC storefronts ever since Minecraft first released in its Alpha state in 2009. Unfortunately, it seems Hold Your Own will forever be stuck in the Early Access stage, as no recent updates have been made to the game for around 8 months. If buying unfinished games is your gig, then this game might just be for you.

Featuring features

Hold Your Own is almost overflowing with features, from day & night and weather cycles to a whole host of things to do. You’ll not only have to keep track of your health, thirst and hunger, but also your temperature – there is a lot to keep your eye on in order to survive.

Surviving consists of completing various tasks like hunting and resource gathering, as well as taking on enemies who are gunning for you. Despite packing the game out with all this content though, it’s not incredible unique – and just feels like a cobbled together mesh of every other survival game out there, sitting in the shadow of ARK: Survival Evolved and Stranded Deep.

Quests, quests, quests

The devs want you to spend more time having fun on quests than being on the brink of death. They decided early on that resources should be easy to find, but hard to keep, so they made the food and water plentiful and the enemies hard to kill. You’ll spend a lot of time protecting your land and farm against bad guys, and crafting a range of weapons with which to take them on and progress. None of these quests are particularly exciting though, and that’s something the sandbox genre struggles with quite a lot – it’s rare that you’ll play through a quest that you’ll remember a couple of hours later. Compare that to a game like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for example, and how even a decade on we are still talking about certain questlines like “Whodunnit”.

The sky is the limit

There are a lot of craftable items in Hold Your Own, with the game-world scaling in terms of technology with each passing in-game day. Starting with pretty simple tools, you’ll soon work your way up to full-scale buildings with helipads, and you’ll be going from hitting enemies with sticks to blasting them with an automatic rifle too. You’ll always have something to progress towards, whether it’s a certain item or an extension of your base.

Minecraft was very open-ended like this, and you could spend hours and hours building a base, luckily Hold Your Own doesn’t have creepers – so your hard work will never blow apart after a small sizzle.

Pros

• Impressive graphical quality.
• Vast range of features.

Cons

• Project has been abandoned.
• Run-of-the-mill concept.