60 Seconds! from Robot Gentleman is a survival adventure on Nintendo Switch where you need keep everyone alive… or at least give it your best effort. Learn more about this one in our 60 Seconds! review!
In 60 Seconds! you will need to do your best to keep your family (and yourself) alive and well for as long as possible after an atomic bomb hits, thus sending you running towards your fallout shelter with whatever rations and items you can secure before your time is up. Your journey will begin with a tutorial-based run in which you’ll get pointers on what to do and how to do it as you plan for your time in the bunker, and once you’re in there the game will steer you towards a successful run so that you can avoid some of the rookie mistakes you might make if you went into the game without any additional information – this Atomic Drill is a must so be sure to pay attention.
The game is called 60 Seconds! because the main premise is that you have a total of sixty seconds to scavenge for an grab as many supplies as you can before the timer is up. Oh, and you should probably also help your wife, daughter and son to get to the shelter as well! The main mode for the game is Apocalypse, in which, based on the difficulty setting you select, you’ll have a set amount of time to explore your house before the scavenge timer starts to run out. Depending on the difficulty you select you will have less or more time for both phases, and the difficulty will also affect how stocked your fallout shelter is on top of the stuff you get from the house – it will also increase how much trouble you get at the shelter and how many unwanted visitors swing by.
Once you’ve grabbed your family members and as much stuff as possible in the 3D roaming/scavenging section, you’ll need to make your way to the entrance to the fallout shelter before your time is up, and once you do this the survival section of the game will begin. Once inside of the shelter the game moves into a 2D static presentation in which you can see the family members you got into the shelter as they slowly but surely start to suffer from being cut from any interaction with the outside world. This is good, because there’s a ton of deadly radiation out there, but it’s bad because, unless you brought enough supplies, some board games and something to defend your family with, you’re not going to survive for long.
Every day you’ll write in your journal, register what is going on, how everyone feels, if anyone is sick, injured, angry, bore and so on, and will need to ration out food and water to each family member. Later in your run you’ll get a chance to send someone outside to scavenge for more food and supplies, but you need to be careful since they might not come back, or might come back with enough radiation in their body to kill them. If they’re injured during their trip outside, you better have a first-aid kit handy or else they’ll be gone for good before the week is over!
The two adults can go a couple of days without food, but the kids need to be fed every day, as well as provided with a ration of water, or else they will get sick and die from a lack of food and/or from dehydration. You might want to start playing in the lowest difficulty to get the hang of things because if you don’t plan properly your run will end in a handful of days in the higher difficulty settings.
Along with the Apocalypse more there are two extra modes you can try out. First up is scavenge which tasks you with grabbing as much stuff as possible during the scavenge part of the game, without having to go into the survival phase inside of the fallout shelter. The other mode is Survival in which there will be no scavenging and you will need to survive inside of the shelter with a randomly selected assortment of supplies and family members – you might have only two family members in the shelter, but with not enough supplies to keep them properly healthy and well for a long time. Again, the difficulty setting you select for either one of these two modes will directly impact how hard it will be to get enough supplies before time runs out/how long you will be able to survive, so be sure to give each setting a go!
Overall, 60 Seconds! is a fun game about the end of the world as we know it. With two very different activities to take on for each section of the game, as well as separate modes that focus on one of those two aspects, there’s plenty of things to do and lots of supplies to find during your time with the game. It might get to a point where you feel it’s a bit repetitive, but that will probably happen after you do a dozen runs or so, which is not bad for an indie release of this nature.
Disclaimer
This 60 Seconds! review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Robot Gentleman.
