Recent reviews by General Durgen

Allow me to begin this review with a very simple header. I have played this game currently for 132 hours in total. I have played through the entire campaign to full completion, and have gotten relatively experienced at playing the randomized survival worlds that the game can generate. This being said, in short, leads me to say what my review will express

I love this game.

This is my first review, so I'll try to keep it short as much as possible.

The campaign is very good at teaching the basics of the game, as well as many of the more advanced aspects. Depending on difficulty settings, it can be incredibly challenging and offer many lessons in tactics and strategies to keep you interested and wanting to try again if you should fail.

It offers a fleshed out tech-tree to learn and spec into, featuring all technologies currently available in the normal game and several upgrades to infrastructure and your individual military units. (For example the basic soldier unit can have massively increased armor upgrades and decent damage and range upgrades compared to the standard soldier in normal survival games. Or the fact that your supply train that arrives daily can bring in shipments of resources and gold every day)

The campaign's gameplay is typical of the usual survival games you'll play here. Hold out against all odds and exterminate all zombies on the map, build your population to a certain level, or hit resource milestone markers. So it can get repetitive; but the locations are each unique enough to keep you interested in progressing by offering different challenges in the placement of your colony on these map scenarios.

The other part of the campaign is the hero missions, which take smaller, unique locations and have you searching them for artifacts and military hardware to bolster your colonies military and research progression. They are usually slow, repetitive, and dragging. But are inherently focused on small and solo unit tactics. Making you make slow, careful decisions to defeat stronger and more numerous forces whilst preserving your own. You also learn more about the story through recovered newspaper articles for completing these missions fully. You have a choice between two heroes. A hard hitting, but slow and unmaneuverable soldier to kill zombies and special zombies at longer range; or a fast, short ranged soldier that can whittle down most normal zombies in moments but will struggle against special zombies. Both can receive upgrades to speed, health, effect radius, range, and damage of their weapons.

The survival games are essentially similar to the campaign, but in a purer form. You are randomly dropped with your colony into several different types of maps with different difficulty levels you can tweak. Your objective is to survive and prosper to the final wave and defeat it, and then earn enough score to advance to the next map. There are also many custom maps available, and these can be downloaded from steams workshop or many other places with the right knowhow.

The modding scene is quite established for this game, and custom stories can be created through the mapmaking process which adds so much more replayability and challenges to overcome.

To make the long story short, this game gets a recommendation from me in its current form. Hope this was informative enough for anyone interested in purchasing this game.