Dead Age is a combination survival, management, and turn based combat game. You play as any number of characters, struggling to survive in the wake of the zombie apocalypse. In my particular playthrough, I played as a student who woke up, couldn’t find his sister, and joined up with a group of survivors. As with any zombie game, the player must fight to survive, battling zombies, raiders, and the constant demon of starvation.

Dead Age’s mechanics are an interesting combination. The management element consists of assigning various members of a survivor group to different activities, such as guarding, hunting, or crafting. Meanwhile, the player and up to two companions travel a particular waste, scavenging resources, battling zombies, and having encounters. Like with Cult of the Lamb, the adventuring element is required to ensure the camp’s continued functioning. However, unlike Cult of the Lamb, the player’s activities and the camp’s activities are independent of each other, with no requirement that the player be in two places at once to ensure the camp’s success. This makes the camp management elements feel more organic, even if there is very little player interaction with them.

Dead Age’s combat system represents one of the more unique gameplay elements, though I’m a bit torn on whether it worked as intended. Dead Age relies on a turn-based combat model for its combats. Players face up to three zombies, using an array of abilities to counter the zombies’ unique abilities and resistances. In practice, this meant I usually wandered out on my missions with at least one friend, punching zombies while my friend ran out of bullets in their gun.

This combat model, in theory, makes for fairly varied combat, as the particular enemies and the party combinations will be different in every combat, and, to a certain extent, that’s true. However, in practice, I found that, despite having a range of abilities at my disposal, my combats fell into a loop. There was not enough variety in my abilities to really justify deviating from them, nor were the enemies different enough to incentivise me to try something new. Instead, I faced similar combat after similar combat, with no real incentive except the nebulous promise that there might be a reward if I pressed on just a bit further, and the knowledge that each combat knocked my health bar closer and closer to a tediously irrecoverable state.

This may seem like an indictment of the game, and I suppose, in some ways, it is. I found the combat uninteresting, and the management elements around it shallow. The story is shallow and generic, and there’s nothing to really tie me to any of the characters or the world. Even the world itself feels generic, as if it borrowed the best elements from other games, and fed them through a male gaze fantasy filter. It generally failed to engage me in any particular way, and just felt tedious to play.

This is not to say this is a universal experience. For those who are more fond of this turn-based combat system, the game may have more to offer. However, for me, I found that the game was tedious and dull, with nothing either particularly good or bad to hook me in. It just existed, as a way to fill my time, but without saying anything or leaving any kind of impact. It is a meh game.

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I had fun with it.

The story is linear, and unfortunately there's not much incentive to play through again other than to hunt achievements. It's a shame they leaned into the story instead of emphasizing survival. A survival mode could have been interesting. Battles can get repetitive, and it is on the grindy side. But the only things that really bothered me were how mouse heavy this game is, and the inability to save when I didn't have time to finish a location. Getting to the end of a location can take a while. It would have been really helpful to be able to save instead of just fleeing because I ran out of time to play.

This game is really interesting and quite addictive once you have gotten used to how everything works. I sometimes wished there was more variety in the random "encounters" that come up. For example, there is one where a little boy approaches you and you have the option to give him food, medical assistance, or nothing. It needs to change up a little. Hope that makes sense!