Roll a dice, throw a six and you die.
(Note: i changed my review because I made an error regarding Kari and I found the savegame location.)
Previous reviews capture my disappointment with this game: too much randomness.
Let me first say that it took some pondering before I decided to buy the game because the approach intrigued me even though it was yet another zombie game. The idea ofRoll a dice, throw a six and you die.
(Note: i changed my review because I made an error regarding Kari and I found the savegame location.)
Previous reviews capture my disappointment with this game: too much randomness.
Let me first say that it took some pondering before I decided to buy the game because the approach intrigued me even though it was yet another zombie game. The idea of having a kind of diary that follows your (groups) exploits with snapshots and text is a new take that could go a long way, provided there's enough in the game to keep the diary interesting.
In fact the game has a kind of fitting tune at the start. And on the whole the sparse art makes it interesting for me.
For a while I actually started to enjoy the game. At first I did the 'no survivor version', but then I moved to 'the road kill' version in which you have to escape town by finding car parts and repairing a vehicle. After some misadventures I managed to setup a core group of three skilled people that had splendid relations and I proceeded to establish secure houses around town. I actually saw myself getting within reach of my goal even though I had not found one single part of the car. None of the locations suggested actually gave me the required parts. We will get back to that later on.
And then.. wham.. one of my key persons died. It turned out she was wounded and infected and well: tough luck.
The first thing I tried to do is to go back to a previous save. This can be found on a pc under Libraries-Documents-Zafehouse diaries as save.zhs.
The game suggests that it is about decisions that you make while facing the rising zombie threat. About your handling of tensions within your group, about your efforts to live through events and overcome obstacles. And while it is okay to throw in a random challenge once in a while, a challenge you can’t do anything about is not a challenge at all, but an ordeal.
For instance when you start out with a group this group is randomly put together. You might start with a group lacking key skills or having already bad relations. Since there is no option to learn or upgrade skills, as far as I know and the handling of relations is limited, your only option is to restart the game.
In addition you have only a limited control over upgrading items. You can order items of a certain category to be upgraded what item it actually will be and what the result will be is unknown. I actually found that one item degraded in a key area: the basic flashlight when upgraded sometimes gets worse in spotting.
Next to this are the random events that are thrown at you. For instance after carefully scouting a small house that had only a few zombies I decided to occupy it and had my entire party wiped out. I was amazed at that, but then live sucks, until I read that this was a random triggered event.
This random system breaks the game. For instance barricading your house might even see a skilled barricader fail in succession because the result is random generated.
Attacks by zombies are relentless and seemingly made to wear you out. They also seem randomly generated and the only way to influence them is that you get attacked more when you make more noise. I tried the trick to draw them away with a bonfire, this worked once for a long time, the second time around it seem not to do much.
And then finally the car quest. The game gives you a clue where to start, but after that everything is a random event. The car or car part(s) might be at the place where the clue points you to.You might find another clue at a random location that gives you the location where you might find another car part. Might. Might. Might.
The game basically becomes a series of dice throws and if six makes a party member die and a one makes you find one of the seven items that you need to find to get out alive, you can do the math. And that is not even calculating the fact that a three gives you an event that severely sets you back. It is like Russian roulette: roll a dice, throw a six and you die.
It is a small game, with some neat features, perhaps after some patching adding more control and less random death events might make it a good game.… Expand
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