Night of the Dead is an interesting Early Access title. It offers a mix of resource gathering, building and direct combat of the survival genre with trap building and maze planning of the tower defense genre and finally you have a light sprinkle of a narrative and end game to encourage exploration.

So how does it feel to play? Well ultimately time is your currency. At midnight, every night, you will be attacked by an ever increasing number and types of zombies. You need to upgrade and expand your base with traps to deal with these hordes. To do so you gather resources, however unlike other games, upgrading your tools and skills does not give you more resources, instead they take less time to gather. Ultimately as you reach the end game you'll be able to explore more, take down zombies quickly and gather resources no the way. It all seems to come together.

On the whole, this works quite well and proves to be an enjoyable and entertaining distraction which is open enough that, despite the ticking clock, you can play it the way you want. I would however caution that as the game stands right now, the tower defense aspect is the core gameplay loop and if that turns you off it might not be for you.

With that out of the way, it's also worth mentioning that the game is very stable. In 50 hours I've encountered minor bugs. The developer has been very active in listening to the community and issued 8 updates so far addressing balancing and bugs with bigger updates planned down the road. Bravo to Jackto for doing Early Access right.

For the future. I'd like to see some user configuration being implemented so people can tweak the game to their playstyle or perhaps workshop support for that and user made traps. As ever, more content and more polish on the existing content would be great. The narrative quest could also benefit from expansion as currently it's pretty much explore location X and get Y. Some mega bosses, maybe encouraging a temporary base to defend against a special quest horde attack etc would add something more to the game.

Finally, the tutorial does expose you to the trap mechanics which is very helpful. I do however think that it might be helpful to split off the tutorial into a separate mode where you have no resource cost and can experiment more freely. As it stands you can easily find your placement is off or ineffective and you're left demolishing a chunk of your base and rebuilding as a consequence.