This was popular for a while when it was in Early Access but I usually wait until a game is finished before even considering buying it. Unfortunately this seems to be one of those cases when the finished game is worse than the work in progress version as the campaign is a real slog to get through and they even took out some ease-of-life features. The scenarios are quite difficult and they made an iron man style mandatory. It’s quite impressive how they’re not afraid of throwing absolutely massive hordes at zombies at you, but in the end it’s not worth the aggravation and I didn’t finish the game.
Though originally offered with a just a survival mode in Early Access, the release version includes a more traditional campaign in which you slowly work your way through a number of scenarios. The premise is a simple one in which human civilization has collapsed due to a zombie apocalypse and the survivors have regrouped within the safety of a crater. Now the ruler of that pocket of civilization has decreed that humanity must reclaim its heritage and spread out once more. So the player has to establish settlements to secure the territory around the crater, send operatives to recover lost technology and wipe out the wandering hordes of zombies in the wilds. As you do so, you also unearth information about the origins of the infection, filling out the backstory. At the beginning of the campaign, you have only archers and your populace must live in tents. Towards the end however, you can deploy soldiers armed with rocket launchers, what is effectively a mecha and powerful defensive towers with an area of effect shocking attack.
Aesthetics wise, this game feels so much like a 1990s-era Blizzard RTS it’s not even funny, right down to the repetitive quips the units spout when you click on them and issue them orders. The resemblance grows more uncanny when you realize that there are also hero scenarios in the campaign in which you guide a character through a map. It’s amusing for a while but gets old real fast. I can forgive that it has subpar graphics because it does need to somehow fit thousands of zombies at a time, but the production values across the board are just not good. The writing is bad, the art design is uninspired and even the two heroes you get are generic archetypes with no identity of their own. Apart from the original premise of making the player face seemingly endless hordes of enemies in an old-school RTS format, this is a game with very little personality.
The gameplay of the primary mode works well enough. You expand your base to increase your number of settlers, subject to resource constraints like wood, food, power and so on. The more people you have, the more gold income you earn, but that also entails expanding across a larger space to build homes for them. This both means clearing more of the zombie infested map and a larger area that you need to defend against incoming swarms. Since these are zombies, once they take down one of your own buildings, that just creates more zombies, making it a snowballing effect. Even just one zombie slipping past your defenses will frequently be enough to ruin your entire base. Another cool quirk is that zombies are attracted by noise, so sounds of combat and especially loud weapons will draw more of them from the rest of the map. This is especially relevant when you’re clearing areas to get at resources or expand your base.
These simple mechanics are enough to create a pretty compelling gaming experience. Passive defenses are never going to be enough to keep out the hordes so you’ll need to reinforce weak areas with troops as needed. As each swarm will be larger than the last, you need to outgrow the swarm by constantly expanding and enlarging your army. Unfortunately the gameplay for the other modes like the hero missions and the wandering swarm destruction missions are mediocre and rather pointless. These were added very late in the development process as part of the campaign and seem to be almost universally disliked by the player base. The hero has no special abilities apart from being able to throw grenades that are picked up on the map. It’s just a matter of slowly and carefully clearing the map of zombies. There seems to be no point to them other than being able to boast of having more gameplay modes than the main one and out of nostalgia for the old Blizzard games.
No matter the mode however, one key stricture makes everything worse: there is no in-game save. A zombie gets past your perimeter and dooms your settlement? You’re done and need to replay the map from the beginning. Your hero dies because you pulled one zombie too many or got stuck from bad pathfinding? Ditto. It’s immensely frustrating and you don’t get a say in this at all. You don’t even get the option to restart a map instantly or voluntarily end a scenario. You need to wait until the zombies take down your Command Center. In the main mode, so much of the difficulty lies in learning from which direction the zombies are going to attack and their composition. The game expects you to learn by trial and error and redo the map until you win, no mean feat when a large map takes a couple of hours to beat. The campaign even locks you to choices made in researching technology. You only get a certain number of research points from beating maps and you need to decide how to spend them to unlock new buildings and units or improve your existing ones. These choices persist for the entire campaign and if you make poor choices, it’s possible that some maps will become unbeatable at some point down the road. It’s insane that the developers think this is a reasonable design.
The only way I could stomach playing this was to save scum on my own, periodically backing up the savegame folder and restoring as necessary. Even with a more permissive save system, this game offers plenty of challenge. The size of the hordes has to be seen to be believed and the more powerful versions of the zombies seen later are no joke. You have to cope with the limited size of the maps and the resources available. No matter how extensive your fortifications are, the game finds a way to send a swarm at you from an unexpected direction or slip a few stragglers in somewhere. Advanced players can micromanage units to kite the zombies as needed and this is required to beat the higher difficulty levels.
But having to manually juggle saves is just too much trouble to put up with on top of the game’s other problems. The campaign is too long and doles out the tech rewards so slowly that most maps feel effectively the same. The hero missions are a speed bump every time you run into one and it’s not like you can half-ass them either as the technology points you can earn from them are quite significant. That requires hovering your mouse over objects to check if they are collectible, old-school style. Anyway I can see why the game was popular for a bit but the campaign as it exists is just not fun for me. Venturing into the survival mode, there is some appeal in being able to freely build up your settlement in preparation for a zombie swarm that can arrive from any direction. But after a while I find the economy booming portion tedious and just find myself yearning for a good old tower defense game instead. Especially when my latest base is destroyed by a group of zombies that manage to slip through a path between the trees that looked impassable to me. Maybe it is time to put this down and try something else instead.