Dead Age

 PC
Metascore
tbd

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User Score
6.0

Mixed or average reviews- based on 15 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 15
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 15
  3. Negative: 5 out of 15
  1. MeritCoba
    Jun 27, 2017
    6
    I am writing this second review almost six months after the first one made by Iseeall.
    Has anything changed for the better?
    First    I am writing this second review almost six months after the first one made by Iseeall.
    Has anything changed for the better?

    First understand that this game is turn based on all levels.

    Strategic turns are counted in days. Each day is divided in two parts. One part is arranging what your home crew will do: you assign your survivors to each specific task, which will cost a certain amount of resources. The group of survivors will be small at the start and expand over time.

    The mission part has you going on missions with a select group of up to three survivors. This always involves your main character and up to two others. Most of the time you get to choose your companions, but at some moments you are required to go in alone or are required to be accompanied with one specific survivor. Sometimes only that specific one, sometimes as part of your team of three.

    Most of the time you will be busy with missions. A mission sends you to a location where you have to advance through up to twenty areas. Each of these confronts you with one to three adversaries which range in difficulty depending on how far you progressed in the location and the level of the location. Each area offers you a small reward for winning the combat and in between some areas you get a random event that offers extra rewards set again a certain amount of risk. The first ten areas are of a lower difficulty. The last ten of a higher. The last area has a boss enemy.

    The good:
    - You start out with a few people and slowly expand your community. You choices about them matter.

    - Managing a crew of survivors feels good. You improve them as they gain more experience.

    - Managing a home crew with meager resources and having the mission team using them is fun. Both feel as part of the whole. Without the home crew the mission team would not have made it. Some games get that wrong. In this game you feel that everyone counts.

    - Every choice is a though choice. Should I assign a survivor to make a gun so my mission crew can do more damage? Or should I put an survivor on guard so my resources don't get stolen?

    - The game makes you progress over time changing from close combat to firearms.

    - Whopping zombies is addictive.

    The bad

    Forced missions that will end the game if not undertaken or botched. This is a screaming fault in this game: not doing X results in death for all. Not doing X should result in though choices or hard combat, not into sudden deaths.

    The game is heavily scripted while your choices have random success. In fact the game is so scripted that a second time around you know what will be coming your way and you will avoid to make certain choices.

    One save. A game developer should never force a player to have only one save game. It is sheer arrogance to take away the choice of a player.

    Fixed male protagonist. Why am I forced to play the same guy and be required to take him along everywhere? I cannot even replace him with another male survivor. I cannot even replace his picture.

    Forced missions As said, the game is heavily scripted and therefore you get missions forced down your throat. Sometimes you just about to recuperate from one forced mission, when another must do mission forces you into danger again.

    Unbalanced combat The combat is unbalanced both in weapons as in fighting. Handheld weapons you use a lot and are actually most adequate. Ranged weapons require ammo, which will only be available later in the game and in limited amounts. Which is fine. However, you will soon notice that some weapons are better than others.
    Combat is also set up so that your enemies will always get one round to attack, regardless of what kind trick or skill you have. This is because those tricks and skill depend on action points, and those are gathered over time.

    Manipulation of the player. I do not like a game that is deliberately set up to give you a good first time experience and then ask you for a review about one quarter in. The first time I got two survivors very quickly. Then I restated the game up to five times, but never got two. I reinstalled the game, still no two survivors. Then i installed the game on another computer and I got the same two survivors again. And only the first time around.

    No manual. You are left to trial and error and to what players write in steam. There is some handholding in the game, but that is very basic.

    Conclusion
    Most of what Iseeall says still is valid with the addition that this is no State of Decay. It lacks the freedom of choice. This is a scripted game offering limited choices within a limited time frame and it becomes predictable once you know how it plays out.
    It is a nice filler for better zombie bashing games when offered against a sharply reduced price. Expect maybe twenty hours of gameplay.    … Full Review »
  2. iseeall
    Jan 16, 2017
    5
    A post-apocalyptic mix of simple turn-based strategy with RPG. Somewhat close to Rebuild and Sheltered, or even State of Decay, but stillA post-apocalyptic mix of simple turn-based strategy with RPG. Somewhat close to Rebuild and Sheltered, or even State of Decay, but still pretty much an original game. It's a mixed bag, since its drawbacks pretty much balance out the good sides.

    The good:
    - the main idea of managing a group of survivors and sending them out on missions works ok, just like it works fine in Rebuild and similar games
    - the charaters have skills, there are weapons, ammo, food, crafting, skills and generally a lot of things you have to manage and take care of. So, it's overall a pretty complex strategy/management game which will play differently across replays
    - it's pretty difficult, even though the difficulty mostly comes from randomness of things. E.g., say, you can loot a vehicle, and with 60% chance you just get the loot and with a 40% you fail and have to fight zombies, or even scavengers which are way tougher than you. Expect to restart the game a lot.

    The so-so:
    - melee weapons are way, way more important than anything else, especially early in the game, just because you don't have much ammo for ranged weapons. You will run out of ammo in the first few fights and will be forced into melee
    - there is a lot of story in the game. So much that almost every day there are mandatory conversations popping up which just never seem to end. You click and click, and click thru them, in frustration, thinking "just let me play the game, shut the hell up!" If you like reading wordy dialog you may enjoy this but my limit was reached right after a few in-game days. What's worse, the text in the dialogs doesn't appear at once, instead it slowly appears letter-by-letter, and a click speeds it up. To me this basically means clicking twice more.
    - on every next replay you get more and more bonuses, essentially making the game easy enough after X replays so that you can finally beat it.

    The bad:
    - combat is very basic here. Your characters stand on the left, the enemies on the right. You exchange blows or shots. Melee weapons simply do less damage than the ranged ones, and there is no "range" as tactical parameter, since everyone is frozen in place and can hit anyone
    - most fights are very similar to each other. E.g. you will face the same groups of 2-3 zombies of 2-3 types up to 20 times (!) per day, until your characters' HP get dangrously low and you decide to return to camp. The "grind" is ridiculous and lack variety. That's probably the main downside of the game, because the tedium of the grid discourages replays
    - it's never clear how much damage a weapon does and what to expect from an attack. This make much of the combat a trial-and-error process. At least the min and max dmg could be shown in a tooltip or something.
    - the GUI is pretty ugly, as most of the graphics. Much of the graphics are blurred and look "dirty". You will even see that on the starting screen of the game. The buttons are huge, so apparently the game was designed primarily for tablets (?) Too much is shown thru the text dialogs which simply never end.
    - there are too few options. E.g. you can't disable animations in battles. Yes, they are fast, but they still take time, and while they are shown all the GUI is blended out. Why? This really doesn't let you easily see who takes damage, how much, and what effects are put on the combatants. Besides you get tired of seeing the same melee attack animation over and over.

    As said, a mixed bag.    … Full Review »
  3. aszu77
    Feb 7, 2021
    3
    I really wanted to like this game and I gave it several chances.

    Unfortunately, there is not much apart from boredom and long fights, that    I really wanted to like this game and I gave it several chances.

    Unfortunately, there is not much apart from boredom and long fights, that you are unable to skip/speed up. The fights are very repetitive; story seems to be quite interesting; quests -so so.

    And one very important thing - you cannot save during fights in the locations - there are 20 sub-levels and if you get to 18-19 and you have to finish (you know some of us have kids...) you're gonna loose all the progress and a whole day.    … Full Review »
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