Review of The Bonfire 2: fanning the flames

Our Verdict

The Bonfire 2 expands on the original with new RTS-style gameplay, but manages to maintain what made the series great in the first place

Numerous survival games have been released for mobile devices; most of them are adaptations of beloved PC games like Don't Starve or Kingdom Two Crowns. The Bonfire in particular sticks out since it seems like it was created just for the platform. It mostly uses taps and occurs in two dimensions. You may tap to construct new structures, designate your survivors as guards, and collect resources.

With an isometric perspective, The Bonfire 2 is essentially the same game that was recently released this week on the App Store. It seems more like a conventional RTS in this sense. You may direct the placement of the many structures you unlock, give the survivors different tasks to do, and improve buildings to provide you more resources you need to survive.

You'll eventually create a thriving community that is able to protect itself against all of the challenges that it faces. When you're through, you'll be proud of what you've accomplished and remember that period of time when all you had was a campfire and a few starving survivors.

The Bonfire 2 works as follows: you take on the role of an all-knowing ruler who must assist in transforming a desolate wasteland into a bustling city dedicated to survival. Building the named campfire is your first chore when you start out with only a few hungry survivors. The rest is mostly up to you as you construct your empire after this.

You may construct a logging house and designate a survivor to increase your wood supply. It would be best to delegate the task of food hunting to someone else, since it is a crucial survival skill. Over time, when additional survivors discover your campfire and want to join your happy little tribe, the list of structures and jobs expands, increasing the workforce but also increasing the number of mouths to feed.

You're most vulnerable at night, as is customary with survival games. You may assign guards to, well, the name gives it away, but your community will often be besieged by ferocious opponents out to pilfer your resources, starting with wolves. These start out being able to defend themselves with simply a torch, but you can ultimately arm and armament them.

However, a guard's secondary responsibility is skin harvesting. With the aid of this useful resource, you may improve your dwelling, giving your group a better night's sleep and more energy for the tasks ahead. You will have fewer task forces throughout the day if you assign a guard, however, since they will eventually need to sleep.

This offers a pleasant push-and-pull, which is essential to The Bonefire 2's gameplay. It's certain that you won't always have the resources you need or require, so learn to live with what you have and make the most of it. In the unlikely event that a more formidable creature attacks, should you deploy additional guards, at the expense of the resources required to provide them with better gear? In The Bonfire 2, you will be presented with decisions of that kind on a daily basis, with no right or wrong response.

Because it is a fact that survivors will perish at the hands of wolves. You'll have too much wood and not enough iron since you won't have the proper resource balance. But that's all part of the pleasure, because without a serious struggle, it wouldn't be a survival game.

The good news is that it works on mobile devices, which is primarily where we're concerned. Though it's not nearly as comfy as the original, it's evident that Xigma Games wants this to function on PCs in addition to touch platforms. A lot of work has gone into the user interface, and we had no trouble completing any chores. The lack of fiddliness would have been acceptable considering that you may halt the activity at any time.

All things considered, we heartily recommend The Bonfire 2 to every enthusiast of survival. Not surprisingly considering its origins, it checks all the boxes and does a fantastic job at adjusting for the mobile platform. Having said that, since it has a lot of similarities with older RTS games, it's definitely worth checking out for fans of those titles.