This game has a lot of potential, but unfortunately the devs have squandered most of it through poorly implemented systems, questionable mechanics, and tons of bugs.
The general concept of the game is that you are trying to rebuild and manage society with your little rag-tag group of survivors after the zombie apocalypse. You build a settlement, must manage your resources, research new buildings, defend against attacks from zombies, wild animals, and groups of marauders. Great concept that could really make for an interesting game. Unfortunately, there are several issues that really ruin the game.
The first and by far most glaring issue is the temperature system. The game has a temperature system with certain buildings not functioning if it’s below a certain temperature. If it gets too cold, greenhouses stop producing food, houses stop keeping people warm, hospitals no longer function, etc. This all makes sense, however the problem is, while the temperature starts out fine the temperature drops so damn fast that you barely have enough time to research the necessary buildings. You typically start off at 20 Celsius and by the 13th or 14th day, it will have dropped to 0 Celsius which is the first cut-off point where things stop working, namely being the first level greenhouses and the lowest level shacks. This means you pretty much must have greenhouse II and house I researched and built by that point. The issue with that is that researching each of those along with the prerequisites takes 5 days for each. Now, you’re probably not going to even have your science lab finish building until the second day, so therefore the earliest you can get those is day 11. But then you also need hospitals to heal your settlers, so they don’t die, which takes another 2 days. Then you need to research heating so that your hospitals don’t stop functioning, which takes another two days. But wait, now that the temperature has dropped, all your buildings are using lots of coal to stay warm, so you need a decent supply of coal which means you need charcoal furnaces and improved mining, which takes another 7 days between them to research. But guess what, by this point you’re probably running low on ammo, so now you need to research a factory and pistol ammo, which takes another 5 days. By that point, it’s now getting cold enough that you need to research the next level of houses and greenhouses. It gets to the point where you’re essentially having to spend all your time researching the bare minimum technologies needed to just survive and don’t have time to research any of the other technologies. This whole system counterintuitively makes it so that it’s easier to play on the “expert” difficulty maps since they have abandoned buildings that you can immediately rebuild and function as high level housing, meaning you don’t need to research the housing for your people to keep warm.
Another major problem is that your settlers, both civilians and soldiers, are braindead. You have absolutely no control over the civilians beyond ensuring that all your civilians are employed so that you can be somewhat certain they’ll remain close to their place of employment, but even that is not always the case. Sometimes your civilians will just do completely random things like wander off into the wild and get killed by zombies or wild animals, and you have no way to prevent this other than micromanaging the movement of every single one of your settlers and sending a soldier to guard any civilian that decides to do something dumb. Additionally, if the unarmed civilians start getting attacked by wild animals or zombies, one would reasonably assume that they would run away but no, instead of making that logical decision they will stay and try to punch a wolf to death, very frequently dying in the process. Soldiers are even worse because their AI seems to be even dumber. Soldiers will frequently not notice civilians being attacked by enemies 5 feet from them and will just stand there and let the civilians die. They will also frequently abandon their post to chase some random wild animal miles away from your base. Their AI which makes them go to the hospital when they’re hurt or sick will also frequently break, with soldiers who are sick and on the brink of death deciding to chase down a wolf instead of going to the hospital. Sometimes even if you physically order them to go to the hospital, they will walk 10 steps before turning back and continuing to fight a wolf, even if you’ve disabled their ability to pursue enemies, so you must constantly order them to the hospital for them to go and stop fighting wild animals. Lastly, your soldiers ABSOLUTELY SUCK AT AIM. Even at higher promotion levels, soldiers will frequently miss a target that is 10 feet in front of them.
And speaking about wild animals, that’s another mechanic that doesn’t make sense. Packs of wild animals will constantly come and attack your settlement. It makes no sense that packs of wild boar or wolves would constantly band together to attack a fortified settlement, but in this game they do. The endless tide of boar and wolves will never cease, never falter, and never slow. Even when you have wild animals set to the absolute minimum, you will still be getting attacked by a wild animal roughly every 15 seconds.
It's a similar situation with marauders. You’ll be attacked by a team of anywhere from 4-15 marauders every 4-5 days. Even if you have very high-level soldiers with high level armor, the marauders are pretty much guaranteed to kill at least one or two of your soldiers every time they attack, meaning they will just slowly whittle down your forces until you have none left, at which point you have to either create more soldiers from your civilians which will likely lead to you not having enough civilians to grow food, or not make anymore soldiers and get killed by wild animals and marauders. The crazy part is, when you research exploration and can finally attack the marauder’s bases, they have like 1/10 the people you do, SO WHERE ARE ALL THESE MARAUDERS COMING FROM!
The last system that is just… why… is base defenses. So, you have a handful of base defense structures you can research and build to help protect your base from the endless onslaught of wild animals and marauders. These take the form of walls, fortified gates, pillboxes, and watchtowers. Now the biggest issue with these is that for some reason you cannot station existing soldiers in defensive structures, you can only station civilians in them, which immediately and irreversibly changes them into soldiers. Additionally, for some reason the pillbox III provides LESS DEFENSE than the pillbox II despite the pillbox II being made of sandbags and the pillbox III being A CONCRETE BUNKER. Explain that one to me.
Now let’s just talk about all the miscellaneous stuff that further takes my opinion of this game down.
- The game will notify you if something is attacking your base if your civilians start getting attacked but won’t notify you as to where the attack is occurring, so you must frantically pan the camera around to every area where you have civilians to figure out where the attack is happening.
- This goes hand in hand with the fact that for some reason clicking on the minimap does not pan the camera to the location you clicked on like it does it pretty much every other game that has a minimap, so the only way to look at a particular area is to use the arrow keys to move the camera all the way to it.
- When you send out civilians on an event quest to go salvage from an area, the civilians physically walk all the way to the edge of the map before disappearing and going on the quest, meaning that they will frequently get attacked by wild animals or zombies while doing so and die.
- Mounted machine guns cannot be removed from a gate or tower once you place them there, meaning if you decide to move the tower or gate, you lose the mounted machine gun which is incredibly expensive.
- The game gives you a camp that you can build which is supposed to be used to keep your unemployed civilians in one place, so they don’t wander off and get killed by zombies. Problem is, the camp is so huge that there’s pretty much nowhere you can build it, and the few places you can need to be cleared of all trees, rocks and various junk which will take weeks of in-game time, meaning you probably won’t have any ability to build a camp until day 50+.
- You have no ability to micro-manage soldiers. You cannot tell them to target a specific enemy, they just pick a random one and shoot, meaning that it’s impossible to team fire enemies to lessen the amount of fire coming your way quickly. This is especially annoying because the enemy marauders DO team fire one of your soldiers.
- There are random little bundles of resources scattered around the world that contain resources such as polymers, wood, fuel, ammo, guns, etc. The issue with these is that they do not get picked up by workers in resource stations. The only way to pick these up is to physically select a soldier and order them to go pick it up.
- Mining resources such as trees and rocks will also create these little resource drops every time a resource node is depleted, so you constantly have to order your soldiers to go around and pick them up near every sawmill, rock crusher and resource station.
- Law points which are used to enact new laws from the various law trees, many of which are VERY necessary for your continued survival (Reduce rations, heaters, Aimed shooting, Good conditions, Intimidation, Labor training, improved assembly drawings, etc.) unlock at such an unreasonably slow rate that you'll maybe be able to have 4 laws enacted by day 50 (which to give you an idea, there's not much to do in the game past day 200, so only having 4 laws by 25% of the way through the game...)
This entire game feels like it’s an early access game in very early development despite having it’s full release over two years ago.
1.5