Road to Vostok is a hardcore single-player survival game set in a post-apocalyptic border zone between Finland and Russia. The Finnish answer to Escape from Tarkov was switched to Godot after controversy with Unity. Now, Road to Vostok has a new demo version 1 v3 (Patch 1)…
In September 2023, Unity announced a change in charging policy for developers. According to the new policy, developers will be charged payments for every installation and even for reinstallations of their demo games! The change in Unity policy has made many developers nervous. The creator of Road to Vostok decided not to take risks too.
The Finnish ex-military and developer of Road to Vostok, Antti, three months ago decided to move the game from the Unity engine to another. Porting took 615 hours and currently, the game is on Godot Engine. Road to Vostok has a page on Steam, the developer offers to try out the new demo version Public Demo 1 v3. It’s a good demonstration of the engine’s 3D abilities. It seems that Godot can meet the requirements of many indie game developers.
And if you’ve tried this this demo, then you've probably already noticed the change of engine which works cool. Problems with crashing, loading, bouncing camera, or strobing there wasn't much either. Just need to figure out how to collect the items from the boards and can go hunting. Notice, that the environment is nice, but a little worse than the Unity versions. Gun handling is pretty good. Movement is fine, but get ready for crouch running and a vaulting mechanic. Among the cons is the AI’s lack of significant defensive strategies; for example, it does not seek cover under fire. Furthermore, once the observer understands what to look for, tracking the AI position becomes relatively straightforward.
But in general, AI performs adequately in the initial demo…
In conclusion
As the developers write, Public Demo 1 v3 is only an extra playtest before the main gameplay loop demo called Public Demo 2. After all the main purpose of this demo is to allow testing of this new open-source game engine that runs Road to Vostok.
