The launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 has been an exciting time for all of us gamers, but it has to be said that the line-up of launch games have had an air of familiarity to them. The vast majority of Switch 2 games currently available are remakes and ports, and while it’s been exciting playing all these great games on a gorgeous new handheld, it’s hard to deny a lingering urge to play something new. Thankfully Survival Kids is here, with a unique co-op adventure that absolutely shouldn’t be compared to the series it once was decades ago.
Our custom protagonists kids are a curious bunch of youngsters, who in true Goonies fashion, find a treasure map in a dusty attic and immediately dream of the riches they might find. After creating a raft that’s a health and safety nightmare they head out onto the waves, and wouldn’t you know it they crash land onto an island on the back of a turtle. To survive this new life they’ll have to work together to repair their vessel, and get back onto the waves. This is how each level of Survival Kids works, and the reason the game doesn’t end after the first raft rebuilding is because the kids keep hitting other turtle islands and getting stranded all over again.
As a group of one to four child adventurers, your goal in Survival Kids is to build all sorts of creations to make your way to the end of each stage and build your raft there. You’ll need to build bridges to cross gaps, climbing nets to get up cliffs, and even a base camp to collect treasure and make a bit of scran for the team. The crafting is remarkably simple, and just involves bringing a selection of materials to a specific spot to magically make a new structure appear. It’s best to think of Survival Kids as a light-hearted co-op chop ’em up platformer instead of an actual survival game, because that’s what it is.
You’ll spend most of your time in Survival Kids chopping trees to gather logs or hitting rocks to get smaller bits of rock, then dragging these materials to the crafting boxes to create the path forward. There’s also a stamina system you’ll need to keep in mind, which will cause you to slow to a crawl while dragging an item or even worse cause you to fall off a climbing net if you’re not careful. To boost your stamina you’ll need to eat food, which you can make by chucking various edible plants into the cooking pot at your base. There’s something very fun about throwing various fruits and vegetables madly into a bowl as a team, and the daft frantic energy is always the best part of playing Survival Kids with friends.
In co-op you can chop and drag as a team to ensure the tasks you need to complete go faster, but this is also balanced out for solo players to ensure levels don’t take hours longer for lonely survivalists. There are various ways to play co-op though, both locally by passing out the Joy-Cons, and online, and it even includes Game Share support to make it as easy as possible to play with others. It’s definitely more fun to work together on your island hopping adventure, as it adds an extra layer of strategy to getting the best times.
Like a classic mobile game of old, each level of Survival Kids has a star rating to aim for based on your completion time. These times are incredibly tight if you’re aiming for a fabled three-star rating, and for a lot of stages I really had to plan the optimum route to ensure I was able to get all the stars I needed. For most of the game these stars will seem pretty superfluous, but right at the end of the game you’ll be hit with an unexpected star requirement for the last set of levels. It’s a bit of a brutal moment, at least it was for me as I was many stars short and had to go back and replay some older stages.
It’s not just speed-running that’ll grant you the stars you need though. You can also get stars by finding hidden treasures and taking them to your base. These are so much more well hidden than I was expecting, which meant I usually missed one of two on my first run through a stage. They add a nice amount of replayability really, and often require you to use various tools to reach them.
As you progress further on your turtle-based awesome adventure, you’ll gain access to new bits of kit that will help you on your way. The first of these is a fishing rod which might sound a bit dull, but you can use it to hook materials to winch them up cliffs which is seriously helpful. There’s also an umbrella you can use to glide and a trampoline that you can place around the level to reach higher areas. These different items are all also used to add various puzzles to different stages, and really help the game come into its own.
Survival Kids is a charming co-op game that’s fun to playthrough with friends, but it was just a little too simple and repetitive for me. I think this is somewhat deliberate to ensure that younger, and inexperienced players won’t struggle with it, but when compared to other more frantic and exciting co-op games like Overcooked, it just can’t keep up. One of the ways it tries to mix things up and increase the difficulty as you progress is by adding turrets that will fire shots that will knock you or the item you’re holding back, and usually off a cliff. To say these are annoying would be an understatement, and as more got added my enjoyment rather rapidly decreased.
Especially for younger or less experienced gamers, Survival Kids is a fun co-op experience that can’t be found anywhere but the Switch 2. It’s got a lot of charm, and working together with buddies is a lot of fun. It will be too simple for salty old veterans though, and this coupled with a few annoying elements in later stages mean it’s not a launch title I’d immediately recommend to everyone.
