Recent reviews by Teddyburton

Alright so here's my thoughts on the game. Having managed to play through a few rounds (with saves crashing) and winning about two rounds so far after an hourish each per match (one by luck).

The game's premise works well, putting yourself into what's essentially any governmental virus outbreak control team like the ones often seen in zombie movies to move in and clear the place out. Your team lands onto Treasure Island and can begin setting up a base of operations that will allow you to expand your squads in order to reclaim more of the island. Pretty generic story overall where Lady Nurse gets exposed to the virus and becomes Patient Zero, and for some reason invunerable to conventional bullets (abit more about that later on).

Patient Zero aka Lady Nurse which is essentially a beefed up Hero Unit is the main antagonist of each playthrough that basically runs around the map infecting capture points in order to put up mounds (or whatever the game calls em, i call em mounds) that securing the capture points. The more capture points the Infected hold, the harder it is for your team to clear the area as zombies of varying types will constantly spawn from said mounds to defend infected capture points.

Your team captures a point by:

1. Killing infected mounds from the immediate area around the capture points
   
2. Having a unit on the capture point, more units = faster capture. Works the same for the infected as well

After capturing a point for your team, you get income generated every few seconds, different areas have different income generation values with the starting areas that are not contested usually providing $50 generation with those further in generating in the $100s.

Said money generated allows you to buy units, research, buildings and weapons for your team.

Both the infected and humans have different types of units, for the most part you can only use the human faction as of now.

For the humans, you have essentially 4 different unit squads (alpha, beta, gamma, delta) that each can hold up to 8 units in a single squad. There are different types of units you can get to build into a squad, the breakdown is as below.


Combat is heavily revolved around the use of Slow-mo cam (Spacebar) similar to games such as Dragon Age, or VATs in Fallout76 for tactical planning such as queuing up skills, moving your units around and setting up crossfires. Each squad travels in formation which can be janky sometimes where units don’t fire over each other, how you use the formation is important.
With the similar ammo concepts like Men of War Assault Squad (without the janky inventory system), units can run out of ammo and require airdrops of ammo boxes in order to resupply.

Your human units have essentially two types of health, HP and Infection. When a unit gets hit, it takes damage and has a chance of being infected. As obvious as it is, if the unit’s HP drops to 0 it dies (duh), but it can also die if it’s infection bar drops to 0 as well. Think of it as a permanent ticking timer or Damage over Time Effect that doesn’t directly affect hp, the only way to cure infection is to get Phase 3 and build a medical center. Early game zombies usually pose little threat to your units unless you get swarmed by multiple spawns from mounds, so usually they don’t get infected as much.

You can upgrade your unit’s weapons when they are standing within range of a Barracks, this costs money and different units can get different weapons.

In order to win, there are a few steps that you have to take.

1. Capture as many points in order to get more income
   
2. Farm as many virus samples as you can get
   
3. Get to phase 3
   
4. Research special bullets that allow you to damage Patient Zero
   
5. Scour the map for her while clearing as many mounds as possible
   
6. Kill her

Pretty tedious list and from my very first playthrough I didn’t know you had to research specific bullets to damage her, my guys were just bullet sponging her like crazy.

Pros
Interesting gameplay, great if you are a fan of RTS games with not too heavy micromanagement

Elements that make the game different, such as ammo system, squad formations, creating an ideal squad

Zombie genre that takes something different (given the saturation of zombie games)

Great potential for future content

Cons
Pathfinding is abit delayed, units don’t react quick to your commands and often take a step in the wrong direction before turning to move properly (think like driving a car in some games)

Height of camera screws over unit placement, meaning if you click on the ground but your camera is somewhat over a building, it recognizes it as ground and your units don’t move, happens quite a bit.

Wall placement, wall corners take up a lot of space, so you can’t effectively wall out certain areas without leaving a side gap that the infected can just waltz in

Not the smartest AI, remember when I said I had a match I won by luck? Patient zero decided to waltz into one of my reinforced areas…yeah.

Line of sight to fire, I get building walls don’t allow you to fire over, but sedan cars? An average person is taller than a sedan…and also your built walls sometimes don’t allow your units to fire over as well.

Bugs
The only bug I got was the cursor disappearing from time to time, making it almost impossible to know where you are clicking.

For its price, it really feels like a good game despite being early access. Plenty of the cons I’ve listed can be ironed out as development rolls along.

I named my character Rick Grimes and went on an axe killing spree similar to what Rick did after he found out Lori died in the prison giving birth.

10/10 wish there was coral around.

Jokes aside this game for its level of graphics brings about what "Zombie Survival" is really all about, rivalling DayZ in terms of the degree of Zombie Survival (but let's not delve into DayZ shall we?)

Aspects of what one would really expect from a zombie apocalypse is reflected in this game, from Sound/Sight attracting zombies (for fairly obvious reasons), to using almost everything you find as a potential weapon and even to storing of supplies (refridgeration of food etc).

Depending on what mode you play (I play mostly sandbox), your skill will be tested in a scenario where your likelihood of survival depends on your actions, sure you got a shotgun but do you really want to take that shot at a passing zombie knowing that the surrounding zombies from blocks away can hear it.

I really like how electricity and water can eventually turn off in time (in sandbox i set to 3 years min though), forcing you to live off dried perishables and build rain collection barrels to collect water.

This game is a great game, with the building/crafting system somewhat similar to 7 Days To Die and the Status Effects from DayZ, this has alot of potential to be one of THE best zombie survival games there is despite graphics being intentionally 2005-ish.