I paid for Infestation: Survivor Stories Classic. They shut down and ran. The moderator I dealt with constantly harassed this review.

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Infestation: The New Z > General Discussions > Topic Details
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Insanity
Is there a particular reason that I don't respawn instantly? It's the only reason I upgraded.
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goretekz
Are you playing Open World or Survival? Open World is 0. Survival is 10. You shouldn't have a timer in Open World.
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Insanity
I'm playing Survival. It doesn't say "Survival takes 10 minutes."
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goretekz
I'm sorry that you feel that way. I'll make sure the store page is updated. It was done way before Survival was added.
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Insanity
How does that help me? Enjoy the review.

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My board was deleted or moved.

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Community Messages > Message Detail
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You have been banned from Infestation: The New Z Discussions
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This is a permanent ban.

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This was the support ticket I entered.
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My Support Tickets:
Survival Time Response - [GC/GD Issue] #85277 Status: Closed Last Updated: Mar 13, 2018 - 21:45
adindino Mar 13, 2018 - 21:40
I spoke with someone on Steam earlier today. I was informed that I must reach out to you for a refund. I upgraded my account. An ad stated that I would respawn instantly on Survival.
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Support Mar 13, 2018 - 21:45
That applies to Open World. Purchases display in all modes. You'll see that it clearly indicates your respawn timer is only decreased on Survival. Thank you for contacting us.
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You can not reply to a closed ticket.

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The ad indicates differently. I was told that I wouldn't recieve a refund until I took down my review.

***IMPORTANT PRIVACY WARNING***
According to Bitdefender, when you log in using the launcher, it sends your password to their server without encrypting it. This is the most basic security flaw; make sure that you use a unique password and email address for your account. This makes you wonder about any other security flaws that may lie within this game.

Edit: Just in case people don't realise how bad this is. If they don't encrypt passwords when they get submitted to their database; staff members can logon to the database and view people's passwords in plain text..

- Start up game for the first time
- Sign up for spam emails
- Get to main menu
- Have to click on an option 5 times to work
- Go to options
- Try to turn off fullscreen, doesn't work
- Try to join a beginner server
- Disconnected for not having a character
- Go to make a character
- Game freezes every time clothing is changed
- Try again to join a beginner server
- Disconnected
- Try to join another beginner server
- Disconnected
- Try to join an official server
- Disconnected for not having a premium account/1hr of playtime
- Try joining ANOTHER beginner server
- Finally connects
- Sit through painfully long loading screen cycling between 2 slides
- Game freezes for 30 seconds
- Finally in-game
- Try to walk around
- Game freezes
- Let go of W
- Game unfreezes
- Press W again
- Game freezes again
- Press shift to sprint
- Game unfreezes, then freezes again
- Try to disconnect from server
- Game gets stuck on disconnecting screen
- Force close the game
- Uninstall and write this review

Update: I fixed the freezing problem by disabling any non-Steam overlay. After playing another 0.6 hours, all I can say is the game is nothing special. 4/10 not worth the hard drive space.

PVP is good....everything else is ♥♥♥♥
The Devs are ♥♥♥♥, they made Cheats for the original games called : TheWarZ also known as Infestation Survivor Stories
after they ruined the game, they made this one to get money from little kids. I don't recommend this game at all.
Also i would not trust the devs in anyway since Fred is still making cheats you can even check his profile on UC he is still active which is a huge red flag for me. And before i forget don't use your main email and main password for this game, the password and email is not encrypted so your email and password could be easily hacked.

The Devs are also really immature, they ban people that give constructive critism and they are toxic.

Sorry for typing errors..English is not my first Language :)

Scroll down for original review

UPDATED REVIEW
Since original 'review' of this game was blown out of proportion and even members of developing team commented on it, I felt it was more than needed for me to really check out Infestation: The New Z to make sure thumbs down is the proper grade for this title. When I wrote the original review (scroll to the bottom to read it), I didn't play The New Z, but played the game that The New Z replaced in Steam's library and hence got its ID. Which one it was, I don't know.

Waiting for DayZ (oh, how the kings have fallen), I was one of the many buyers of The War Z and also one of the many who refunded the game. I didn't do it because of false advertising which was the main reason why Steam approved refunds, but of constant bugs, glitches and bad optimization. It was simply a bad game, no matter its status (I think it was alpha back then). After The War Z came Infestation: Survivor Stories. It failed horribly. After that one came 'spiritual succesor' (Insert Michael Scott's NO GIF) Romero's Aftermath which I've downloaded because of, well yes, George A. Romero who's work I deeply respect and appreciate.

I don't know if any other games came after that one, but the latest one, The New Z, appeared on my Steam store's frontpage a few days ago. And the reson why I wrote negative review instantly is because it looked suspiciously similar to previous titles.

I've clicked, as I always click on any zombie FPS with survival tag. I am still looking for the perfect one, after years and years of purchasing and trying out mediocre, if not terrible products that simply fail to deliver the fun mixture between realism and FPS chaos. Unfortunately, most of survival titles on Steam are nothing more than wagons on the hype train, except few notable exceptions (I am looking at you, The Long Dark, Subnautica and The Forest).

The New Z is marked as ultimate free-to-play experience, combining three closely related genres into one: battle royale, survival and open world.

Let's start with the best one, at least in my own not so humble opinion. Survival is slow paced horror of surviving days and night in hostile environment. Resources are scarce, zombies are many and mainly located around loot areas and community is almost completely comprised of soloists who kill on sight. I've been trying to find players to join group for hours and only twice people responded and added me to their group. Playing this mode in the long run proved non-productive because at the end, you'll be starving and unless you have free bus ticket or can afford pricey one (more about it later), you may leave yourself stranded away from any potential food and water source. Strength in numbers, so if you don't have any friends, be prepared for much more difficult journey. The New Z fails grouping the players just as other similar games simply because their zombies are not dangerous enough, they don't present a serious threat to solo players, even unarmed ones.

Survival map is huge and it takes a lot to travel it on foot. There are small stashes of resources scattered around the map which are not marked on the map, so exploring can be rewarding, but make sure you're prepared. My favorite part of the day was dusk turning into a night.

If you get tired of surviving and need to take a break, there are several safe zones marked on the map. Here, there's no shooting and you can leave your extra stuff in the vault, so it waits for you when you come back or in case you die. Next to these are bus stations which are really useful for fast travel, but once you're out of free tickets, you either need to relay on buying bus tickets or getting premium account (more about that later) which allows for free bus transport.

Open World is PVP oriented mode. Smaller maps, more aggressive and diverse zombie types (huge one, fast one, lots of classic ones) and numerous loot instances. Here it's all about kill or be killed and your round will finish much earlier than expected, especially if you're not precise with your weapons.

Battle Royale, one of the selling points of this free-to-play game was something I couldn't try at all because of technical problems most players encounter, a black screen upon entering the server. Game starts with players gathering in the lobby and shooting each other relentlessly until the countdown begins. It is 100 player game, but most players I had on server was around 40. Unfortunately, after the countdown ends and real royale begins, my screen went black. Changing graphic details never did anything, so I cannot judge this mode, but I have to say I didn't get a chance to play it at all.

Judging from my previous experiences, The New Z is plagues by the same technical problems and glitches as its predecessors. There are a lot of getting stuck glitches and fall damage glitches. I've encountered a few sound glitches as well. The biggest problem were the same, clumsy zombie animations. Zombie combat isn't really revolutionary - you aim for the head, unless you have a melee weapon, then you aim for the weapon and move back and forth, trying to calculate when the next swing of zombie arms will happen. Zombies are sometimes hit during their hit animations, so it resets and drops a few frames of the next one, landing you a hit when you don't expect one.

The biggest problem of The New Z is its microtransactions, which make The New Z more of a freemium game than anything else. Beside normal, free accounts, you have a chance to purchase different tiers of premium accounts with different perks, ranging from smallest, priced at around 2,60 € per month (pretty much useless), up to lifetime premium priced 200 €. Beside that you get to buy Game Coins, a premium value that's being used for almost everything in the game. I am type of player who can play the game without purchasing anything and still have fun, but I do have a problem with this business practice. Some of it is pretty ridiculous, you need to pay for private servers, skinboxes are overpriced (any let's be honest, some of these skins are DAMN UGLY) and you can even pay to reset player timer (when your character dies, a certain amount of time needs to pass so you can use the player again).

I'm on the fence about player progression system presented in the game. You can use XP points gained by killing to upgrade your character's stats. It gives a certain amount of depth to the game, but on the other hand, advantages gained can present a huge problems for up and coming players.

In terms of Dungeons & Dragons alignment system, if The War Z and it's successors were chaotic evil characters, The New Z is chaotic neutral; D'n'D Player's Handbook states that chaotic neutral characters 'promote the ideals of freedom, it is their own freedom that comes first; good and evil come second to their need to be free', meaning although The New Z is being promoted as free-to-play title, you will in the process lose either money (buying stuff) or time (surival games are interesting, but without truly deep system and some goals, ultimately pointless), and let's not even start talking about your nerves when you drop dead because of game bugs and glitches.

In the oversatured market of bad zombie survival FPS/TPS shooter games (minus Miscreated, I haven't played it yet), The New Z may be the king, but the one eyed in the land of the blind. And that's not something to be proud of.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

So basically, it's the "brand new" game that I've somehow miraculously already played without even knowing about it.

Just seeing models, menus and FONT gives me idea this is one of million of WarZ, Infestation, Romero's Aftermath, what's-the-latest-name-for-it clones pumped up on microtransactions, ready to be shut down at certain point and replaced with the next one.

Steam should really get this ♥♥♥♥ sorted, I prefer having idiotic visual novels swarm all over Steam's store page over this.

NO.
NO.
NO.
NO.
NO.

HELL NO!

War Inc: Battlezone...
War Z...
Infestation...
Shattered Skies...
Nether...
and now "The New Z"...
Only took me 10 minutes to realize its the same broken, aged, garbage engine, different theme and obvious dev rename.
Cash in, Cash out, Abandon
Rinse & Repeat.
No thanks Sergey Titov. Your games always fail to impress. ^_^

You deserve every dislike. DO NOT IN ANY SANE WAY DOWNLOAD THIS. Here is why.

- "anti-cheat" is actual spyware, like literal. Open paypal or amazon website and watch this ♥♥♥♥ in task manager.From idle cranks up system time to hell yeah il steal yo info. Open youtube - goes idle again.

- Absolute ♥♥♥♥ community. I mean like literaly. Expected from a f2p game.

- 0 optimization. I run it at 89-92 fps and stutters and sometimes freezes when moving trough cells.

- Looks damn ugly once ingame,

I downloaded this to see hows the f2p side is going on with indie devs on steam. The DayZ guys, The Forest team and all the others deserve every euro/pound/dollar. Period.

wanted to see if this was actually a meme especially after looking at the spawn kill reviews

its no joke, as soon as i loaded in bullets started whizzing past my head, and when my green protection thing disappeared more bullets came rapidly flying at me

then some other guy instantly killed me with his sniper

then the game told me to wait 3 minutes to respawn or pay real money to spawn now

then i uninstalled

Infestation: The New Scam.

Tl:dr 7/10 The game is fun but challenging.

/*
* As a quick edit, I have only played the open world game mode.
* I apologize for any confusion this may have caused.
*/

The game isn't easy. My experience with it has been about what I expected, and since so many reviews aren't very helpful, I will try to be.

1. Community is what you'd expect from any game like this.

-Pros will kill you for the can of soda you picked up a second prior.

-Noobs will kill you on sight to level up their characters.

-Everyone else either wants to team, or collect items for their global storage.

2. Game play is different than most games I have played.

-There is a global storage system that allows players to go into a server with an arsenal they like or have previously survived with.

-You can make groups with friends or clans to work together against others or solo it and still be just as effective.

-Super zombies will relentlessly chase you if they are aggroed and unprepared players will die every time.

-Upon death you drop all items and are forceably removed from the server. Then you must either pay in game currency to wind down the timer, or simply wait a few minutes to respawn. To bypass this entirely, you could make multiple characters.

-Upon spawning back in it is possible to find your dropped items, but getting to them before another player does is unlikely.

3. In game currency.

-there are two types of ingame currency: real money and zombie money. While probably not their actual names, zombie money is obtained by killing stuff and is generally above 50$ per kill. The highest I have gotten so far is $1248 for killing a zombie with a melee headshot. Both currencies can be used to buy everything except skins, which require real money or to randomly find them in game to earn.

Many people have downvoted this game for some of the things I listed, but I personally think this is one of the better pvp experiences I've had in a good while. My opinion may change in the future, but these are my thoughts so far. I hope that this review was helpful to you.