Survival Kids review - lost in blue on the Nintendo Switch 2
The only full price third party exclusive for the Switch 2 launch is a reboot of Stranded Kids, which Konami has turned into a co-op game.
For a long time, we thought we were the only people that remembered Survival Kids on the Game Boy Color (or Stranded Kids as it was known in Europe). The game was always fascinating to us, as its open-ended gameplay arrived years before the modern concept of survival games and yet it's never credited for inspiring the likes of Don't Starve and DayZ. Perhaps it didn't, perhaps it was just parallel evolution, but we were glad to see it return for the Switch 2 launch.
We came away quite optimistic about it when we played a press preview earlier in the month, but that was when we were surrounded with other experienced players, who knew what they were doing. Sadly, the reality of playing the game in a more ordinary setting is that it's not the jolly co-op adventure that was intended.
Konami and developer Unity were clearly aiming for an Overcooked! style game of organised chaos but while Overcooked! is like a fun kids' party, with everyone running around and having fun, Survival Kids is more like an awkward family get together, where no one is talking and you can't wait to leave.
Despite its name, and the franchise's origins, Survival Kids is not a survival game. You do play as a kid stranded on a series of islands (which are actually the backs of giant turtles) but you can't die and you don't have to worry about your health or hunger. Instead, there's a very regimented approach to surviving your predicament, that plays out in an identical manner from one island to the next.
There's virtually no story, but you do get constant commentary from comedian Marcus Brigstocke, who does his best to seem interested in what's going on, helped by a script that does have a few mildly amusing lines.
Survival Kids can be played by up to four players online or two locally, but the whole thing is also perfectly playable on your own – although that magnifies the amount of backtracking you'll have to endure. You start off, washed up on the beach and have to collect the three principal resources of wood, stones, and vines, in order to build a base camp – which houses a cooking pot and workbench.
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The cooking pot takes both fruit and fish, in order to boost your stamina bar, which runs out whenever you do anything straining, including chopping down trees and dragging objects. The stamina bar, represented as a circle constantly hovering by your character's face, is hugely irritating, as it runs out quickly and slows you down to a crawl, as you wait for it to recharge.
It's clearly meant to encourage co-operation, by two people carrying larger objects together, but that just ends up with you getting frustrated at them as well. A lot of things in the game seem purposefully designed to irritate, especially the fixed turrets that appear in later stages, and having to go back to base camp to change tools – since you can only carry one at a time.
The problem here is that games like Overcooked! and are based around organisation and simple action skills. Survival Kids has none of the latter and while you do have to organise other players, it's less a case of prioritising tasks and more just encouraging them to focus on helping you.
Besides, the game makes it clear what you're supposed to be doing at every point, while your overarching goals are always just activate an elevator and/or rebuild your raft, which gets damaged every single time you go to a new island.
Instead of action, Survival Kids is puzzle-based, with walls to knock down with exploding flowers, objects that get blown around by the wind from your fan, and various switches to push and pull. A few of the puzzles are quite clever, in a sub-Zelda kind of a way, but they're not the sort of thing that really lends itself to a four-player co-op game, especially when the intended audience is presumably meant to be children.
Having one person climb up a ledge, so someone on the ground can throw items up to you, or moving a platform to get someone to an inaccessible location is mildly satisfying, but it never seems worth the trouble of setting up a co-op game in the first place. If anything, playing in co-op is longer and more time consuming than on your own, because you've got to wrangle the other players into doing what's needed.
As well as the umbrella, you get a small variety of other tools, including a fishing rod, fan, and a cannon that shoots objects a long distance, but these require blueprints and, maddeningly, these are 'lost' every time you go to a new island. This combined with the constantly breaking raft and faulty elevators, makes the game far more repetitive than it needs to be, especially as there's not actually that many islands. More Trending
For a full-price game this is extremely short and while it forces you to collect more stars (given to you for how quickly you complete an island and how many secrets you find) to unlock the final section it still has little replayability once you know the solution to the various puzzles.
As one of only two exclusive third party games for the Switch 2, Survival Kids is a huge disappointment. The co-op options are welcome, but the graphics are extremely unimpressive and clearly could've been done on the original Switch. The very bland, cartoon art style also seems a big mistake, as no kid – certainly none we've tried to get to play it – is going to enjoy what is at heart a fairly slow-paced puzzle game.
While there are plenty of ports of big name third party games for the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, this is currently the only example of an exclusive title from a major publisher. It's not a very encouraging start though and hopefully not a sign of things to come.
In Short: A dull and frustrating co-op puzzle game, that has little chance of entertaining a younger audience and is too simplistic and repetitive for adult gamers.
Pros: The basic concept is sound and some of the puzzles are quite clever.
Cons: Extremely repetitive game structure. Stamina bar and fixed turrets are hugely irritating and traversal and puzzles just aren't fun. Single-player is even more long-winded.
Score: 5/10
Formats: Nintendo Switch 2Price: £44.99Publisher: KonamiDeveloper: UnityRelease Date: 5th June 2025
Age Rating: 3
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