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.… Expand
