Sooner or later, humanity will collapse. No one’s questioning that. But who will inherit the Earth? Now that is the real question! The devs behind Keep Her Safe, the ever-so-talented Gugu Studio, have an idea, and it’s a doozy.
Keep Her Safe is an unusual survival shooter that combines exploration, scavenging, base building, and tower defense. There are plenty of zombies begging to be shot, supplies to be collected, and a settlement to be protected. And we get to do all of that as a chicken. Yup, chickens are the new cockroaches. They outlive everything in this distant future.
A Chicken with a Mission
The story begins after seven days of mysterious acid rain have devastated humanity. All that’s left are ruined cities and hordes of undead creatures. Some animals have developed intelligence. Some of those animals are chickens, of course. Our mission is to protect an unfinished rocket project that could potentially, hopefully, save what remains of civilization. But to make things a tad complicated, the surrounding wasteland is crawling with zombies, and those damn zombies won’t kill themselves. No, no, our expensive defenses will gladly do that.
Before we even think about doing that, however, we need to explore dangerous locations, search for supplies, fight enemies, and return to our base with whatever valuables we’ve managed to grab with our chickeny little talons. The game borrows elements from extraction shooters, particularly when it comes to inventory management and deciding which items are worth bringing home. We enjoyed the scavenging aspect quite a bit, especially since the resources we collect are necessary for improving equipment and constructing additional defenses. And that is quite fun! There’s a pleasant sense of progression as our collection of weapons, materials, and upgrades grows.
Combat involves different firearms, equipment attributes, and upgrades that make us more effective against the undead. We can also recruit animal mercenaries, provide them with equipment, and have them assist us during expeditions or defensive encounters. This was our second favourite thing about the game. Character progression and equipment customization offer additional options to experiment with.
Building Our Little Fortress
Base building and tower defense are other great aspects of the experience. Our settlement houses the Energy Core, which must be protected against incoming zombie hordes. To accomplish this, we constructed defensive structures, reinforced vulnerable areas with fences and sandbags, and installed automated turrets equipped with different weapons. They do their thing while we do ours by participating directly in the fighting. It is, after all, written by the chicken gods that a handful of automated turrets can’t handle an entire zombie apocalypse on their own. That would be rather optimistic.
We also enjoyed how scavenging and base building complement each other. They’re like ice cream and cake. Or, in chicken language, like thing one that chickens eat and thing two that chickens eat. We don’t know, we’re not chickens, but you get the point. The materials and equipment we bring home can be used to improve our defenses, while additional mercenaries and stronger weapons help us prepare for the next attack. We can experiment to our heart’s content with different defensive arrangements, and preparing the settlement becomes an enjoyable activity in its own right. It’s a great game, and we had fun messing around and flapping our digital wings, thinking we could actually fly.
A Few Feathers Out of Place
As much fun as we had, we have to mention that the gameplay can start feeling a tad repetitive after several hours. All the activities we’ve mentioned above can be entertaining, but the routine doesn’t change dramatically. We would have appreciated more variety in both objectives and encounters, particularly when returning to areas in search of additional resources. While we’re nitpicking like the adorable chickens that we are, it’s worth mentioning that the difficulty can feel uneven, with certain encounters proving noticeably more demanding than others. Playing solo makes these fluctuations more apparent, and we did play solo. It’s a tough job for one little chick to manage defenses AND deal with all those big, bad zombies. It’s not enough to ruin the experience, far from it, but a smoother difficulty curve would certainly put our gentle souls at ease.
Our score: 8/10
Keep Her Safe is an enjoyable survival game. It’s really fun. And it’s cheap as chips. Or, in chicken language, cheap as the cheap things that chickens eat. What do chickens eat? It’s not grass, is it? Oh gawd, we know so little. Maybe the apocalypse isn’t such a bad idea after all. It is, for sure, but this adorable game, with its peculiar sense of humour and surprisingly entertaining mixture of scavenging and tower defense, certainly isn’t. For its modest asking price, it’s worth considering if you enjoy survival games with plenty of upgrades and base management. Bawk, bawk, mothercluckers!
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