Open world survival games are wonderful things, they're one of the few genres that allow for proper gaming immersion outside of VR (virtual reality) gear. Letting the player detach themselves from reality and the pressures of everyday life is a rare thing, and a feature few games can boast to truly achieve.

However, despite their immense abundance on the market, zombie themed exploration and survival video games are seemingly the most popular out of all the large scale universes that we are gifted with. Steam titles like DayZ & Unturned spring to mind as two of the biggest roaming worlds available to wander round in.

Immune adds itself to the ever growing mountain of early access zombie games, seemingly forever trying to nab your cash before the game is even complete. The key difference here though, is that Immune has real potential in terms of progression, immersion and fun. I say that not to jab at some studios, but instead, because I really mean it.

As a 3D, top-down zombie survival game, it really stands out from the crowd because of what it offers at this initial point in development. You play as an unnamed survivor who is condemned to try and endure the now hostile world around them, with or without the help of other players in their world.

The main, obvious, focus is to keep living. This entails gathering supplies, building and fortifying a home and then establishing a viable food supply. Beyond those three basic needs, you don't actually have to do anything at all. Except, that's the beauty of surviving in a game like this, you can choose what you do next once you feel grounded and ready to move around.

A map of the game's current available area is shown in the menu and it's deceptively bigger than it looks. Only a quarter of the total playable space is currently available at this stage, with a big fat white line at the edge saying “coming soon :)” on it, if you walk to the end. It is just enough content for now to keep players interested and playing until the next update.

Multiplay features within the servers are actually pretty strong thus far, you can locate, help and communicate to other survivors through the in-game chat system adjacent to the menu button near the top of the screen, along with your health and hunger bars. It was a real boost of morale to talk to another person after playing solo for an hour or so, it kept the boredom at bay.

Much like all early access games though, Immune suffers from some obvious glitches and flaws in terms of objective gameplay and features over a longer period of time. The most obvious being the clunky controls and the combat, which are both clearly works in progress. Both are utterly horrible to use as a first time player, and as someone who uses a gamepad normally this didn't help me at all to actually get into the swing of things.

When you push forwards you sometimes continue moving even when not doing so, which causes problems because you might accidentally stray into a zombie infested household. The controls to coordinate yourself are sickening, as I spent a good twenty minutes trying to walk diagonally towards a settlement. And the car/jeep controls are so terrible to use that they might as well have given you a brick to drive around.

Obviously these will be fixed in the near future, as they, the developers, have a hub on Steam that supports them. But as I mentioned before the real issue lies with the combat. It's infuriatingly difficult to actually kill anything in this game without the use of a vehicle or a firearm. Seriously, the hit range and detection is so imprecise on melee weapons that it's next to impossible to actually hit anything without it hitting you first.

To make matters even worse, the zombies, and any other enemies, have perfect accuracy and do oodles of damage if they so much as scratch or skim you from a distance. It's a flawed system that needs to be reworked to stack the odds slightly more in the players favour because all it does is ruin a decent, early form, game.

Overall though, Immune is well put together, it's by no means brilliant, but I imagine it will be in the future if the developers keep listening to the feedback given and keep at the updates. I really think that this game can become something very great indeed when it's actually 'officially' released on the market.