Devast.io
is a post-nuclear apocalypse survival
Web Game, made by two French creators collectively known as LapaMauve, who have earlier made
Starve.io It forces the player to reckon with both fellow players (unless they manage to team up) and hostile ghouls, along with the shared challenges of avoiding hunger, cold and exposure to radiation.
Devast.io provides examples of the following tropes:
- Action Bomb: The Explosive Ghouls are this.
- Arbitrary Gun Power: The MP5 is famous in real life for a reason, yet in the game, it is one of the weakest guns, and has some of the lowest damage per shot.
- Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: The developer appears under impression that uranium just magically gives off electricity through its radioactivity. A whole suit of Power Armor is made out of metal and alloys, with wires, electrical parts and 2 pieces of uranium as the only remaining ingredients. Its Tesla Armor upgrade simply requires more of the same, demanding a whole 10 pieces of shaped uranium. Actual nuclear reactors only generate power through using the heat of nuclear fission to boil water and use the resultant steam to drive turbines - not the sort of things you can fit inside a suit of armor, let alone doing so safely to the occupant.
- Bows Versus Crossbows: Both are present, but are quite balanced; Crossbows deal 10 more damage than bows, but fire slower. The main difference is often in the crafting resources: bows require Animal Tendons in addition to Wood, while Crossbows instead need Strings and Shaped Metal.
- Friendly Fireproof: Averted, which is rather rare for an .io Game with a team mechanic.
- Good Old Fisticuffs: Your only way to attack if you didn't craft anything yet.
- Guns Do Not Work That Way: Where to start...
- The whole process for making top-of-the-line modern firearms out of a couple types of scrap is obviously ridiculous, and that is before we get into uranium being necessary for the creation of most of them.
- Desert Eagle is a straight-up upgrade to the 9mm pistol, and uses the same ammo, even though the whole reason for its famous lethality is the extremely large ammo it uses, whether the .44 Magnum or the straight-up .50 Cal.
- The Goomba: Normal Ghouls are weak enough that most players consider shooting them a waste of ammo.
- Hand Cannon: The Deagle.
- Heavily Armored Mook: The Armored Ghouls.
- In-Universe Game Clock: An important element of the game, especially when it comes to ghouls. The basic variety will start bothering you after two in-game days, and the others will join in at later intervals. Moreover, all ghouls are stronger and more numerous at night.
- Item Crafting: An important element of the game, though it is quite abstract. You begin by making a stone Hatchet, then upgrade to Bows and Spears, then start making 9mm pistols, shotguns, MP5s and AK-47s! To create those, you need nothing more than undefined Alloys, shaped Metal for most advanced guns and either Sulfur (which is technically one of the ingredients in blackpowder, but is useless without saltpeter and charcoal), or ...shaped uranium.
- The idea is apparently that small quantities of uranium would act as a propellant through a mini-explosion. The problem with this premise, besides the obvious one of radiation, is that uranium needs to be present in a critical mass to start a chain reaction, and any piece of it small enough not to immediately kill the user in an explosion would at most "fizzle", which has little kinetic power, but releases a ton of heat and radioactive isotopes!
- Oh, and once those uranium-driven guns get too boring, just finding some electronics will let you craft Laser Pistols and Laser SMGs!
- Nail Gun requires considerable quantities of Animal Fat, of all things, to make.
- Medkit needs shaped uranium to work!
- Gasoline is made out of Rotten Oranges and Sulfur.
- Kevlar Suit is named after Kevlar, a type of specialised impact-resistant plastic. Yet, here you can create one perfectly well through taking a Leather Jacket and adding extra leather, strings, and bits of alloys and shaped metal to it.
- Radiation Mask only requires one piece of shaped metal, and some strings and leather. For reference, here's how even the most basic, not remotely radiation-proof respirators actually work.
- Welding Helmet is an upgrade over a basic Metal Helmet, yet requires neither glass nor plastic of any kind. However, it does need 155 nails, while its Gladiator Mask upgrade needs 260. Whole suits of Power Armor need no nails at all.
- Power Armor requires Electrical Parts and Wires and such: Fridges only need Metal and Sulfur! (Technically, the old iceboxes could keep food cold through good isolation alone, but sulphur is unlikely to help much here.)
- Nail 'Em: Downplayed; Nail Guns can be fired at range, which makes sense, since you craft them yourself and obviously have no interest in making a safety system which prevents that in Real Life. Even so, it is the weakest weapon in the game, and is best used to repair walls.
- No Plot? No Problem!: There is speculation that this game is somehow the post-apocalyptic future of the creators' previous game, Starve.io, but besides that, there is no actual plot or lore to speak of.
- Powered Armor: The second most advanced armor you can craft. Its direct upgrade is Tesla Armor. Both are driven by Shaped Uranium.
- Powerful Pick: There are three types of pickaxes. While they are better used to actually mine ores, the most powerful type is also a decent melee weapon, whose user has a good chance of defeating a pistol user. That variety is Sulfur Pickaxe. Given that sulfur is a very soft powdery substance in real life, it's unclear what exactly makes it stronger than a normal metal pickaxe.
- RPG Elements: Players gain levels, which allow them to craft more advanced things, and to use their skill points to gain perks. However, those are mostly about either increasing the sight range or your inventory limit, with only a few more unique perks like Light Weight, which makes you less likely to trigger traps.
- Spikes of Doom: Wooden spikes are so far the only trap you can lay down against both ghouls and the other players.
