[Endzone - A World Apart]

Passably done indie title in a genre with much better, deeper games out there that are more worth your time than this one, unless you're a die-hard post-apocalypse fan.

• Audience :

☐ Kids
☑ Everyone
☐ Mature players
☐ Adult only

• Graphics :

☐ Potato
☐ Bad
☐ OK
☑ Good
☐ Beautiful
☐ Masterpiece

• Price / quality :

☐ Full price (I’ve gotten more than enough quality and playtime for a mere 15 bucks!)
☑ Wait for sale
☐ Average
☐ Refund it if you can
☐ Dont do it

• Requirements :

☐ Toaster
☐ Minimum
☑ Medium
☐ Fast
☐ High end

• Difficulty :

☐ You just need 2 arms
☐ Ez
☐ Average
☑ Above Average
☐ Hard
☐ Dark souls


• Game time

☐ Really short ( 0 - 2 hours)
☐ Short ( 2 - 8 hours)
☐ Few hours ( 8 - 12 hours)
☐ Long ( 12+ hours)
☑ Endless

• Story
☐ It doesnt have
☐ Serviceable
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Fantastic

Others:

Multiplayer: No
Singleplayer: Yes




This is a long one, but I feel everything below is important to the reasoning behind my decision and conclusion.

I’m nearing 30 hours in this game so far after picking it up early last weekend while it was on sale, have been following it for some time and as I tend to avoid early access titles like the plague, was content to wait it out until official release. Since I didn’t play the EA version at all I don’t have a comparison and won’t be comparing anything from that period of development, just my impressions from the launch version. With that out of the way…

I’ll start out with the things I liked; post-apocalyptic genre is a favorite of mine, I’ve long been a fan of things like Mad Max, Fallout, and other movies/shows/games in the genre so this immediately caught my attention when I found out about it roughly a year ago. I can’t say I’m disappointed with how the design work faithfully followed hallmarks of the genre with the various building designs i.e. rusted metal, scrap wood, torches and barrel fires for light/warmth, and so on. The graphics are perfectly fine too, while not being top of the line even for RTS games they’re serviceable, though a bit more aliasing than I’d tend to prefer.

I like the camera movement options a lot and this is something that is high on my list of priorities with strategy games in particular; you can reposition the camera with WASD, right-click dragging, moving the mouse to the corners of the window, and clicking the minimap. A lot of games have a few of those, not many have all of them. I like having versatility and options in the controls like that. There’s also a hotkey (f) to snap back to your “town center”(which is an old bus that can be upgraded a few times over the course of a session).

Ambient sounds in the game (more noticeable when the forgettable music is turned down, will get to that in a moment) are well-done and add to immersion, they range from the creaking metal of an old warehouse to the whistling wind whipping through a partially-collapsed apartment complex, to the mingled eerie/soothing tone of the “wind chimes”, and so on. Well done on that and it’s one of the things I liked about Fallout games too.

The gameplay is not overly punishing like in Frostpunk and it’s not mind-numbingly easy either, so for those who like a more relaxed strategy game it’s going to be more up their alley, although some scenarios and user-defined session settings still provide considerable challenge for players who want it.

In-game feedback button is a surprise and I like the concept, but I’m hoping that the studio is making use of it and taking the feedback sent seriously; I’ve been making generous use of the function both to point out things I like, dislike, and want changed.

On to things I don’t like:

When settlers die, there's no way to immediately find out what profession they were performing in order to replace the now-vacant role, unless you're staring at the profession window 100% of the time.

“Combat” if it can be called that is severely lacking; I understand the main purpose is to build a functioning town in the post-apocalypse but there’s no depth to hostile forces in the world. All raiders consist of are a random circle of enemies that come in from a random direction, demand payment (you can refuse to pay) and then roll into your village and wreck your stuff and steal your supplies. Your defense options are very poor; you can build some towers, a siren, or a barricade but the barricades are very small and raiders just walk around them unless you build a ton and they’re expensive to build.

Don’t listen to the tutorial narrator when he suggests you have time to change your defense strategy accordingly when raiders appear; you don’t, not even close. There’s no walls, traps, or anything else and although having metal or rubber bullets to give lethal/non lethal defense options is interesting, nonlethal doesn’t accomplish anything and just makes things more difficult because raiders have no reduced damage when their morale (the nonlethal HP bar) drops, whereas lethal will whittle away their numbers and thus their damage to your stuff.

Your settlers don’t react one way or the other to your choice of combat method either, and there’s no relations to build with other settlements. You can’t be the bad guy whatsoever if you want to raid (I don’t personally but that’s not the point), and there’s no nonhuman/mutant enemies to give enemy variety either.
The research window is oddly sparse, and it feels like there’s way too many “trees” of research to justify the relatively small number of things to research.

The map you start in is all there is and one of the base resources, scrap, becomes increasingly-cumbersome to acquire over time as the scrap piles get depleted making you move your scrap collectors further and further out until nothing’s left and you can only rely on slow-accumulating scrap collector buildings.
The inventory window for your turnover gain/loss in production is your best friend but this isn’t really highlighted in the (VERY) long tutorial which confused me. Maybe I’m mis-remembering, but I don’t recall it being pointed out as absolutely crucial to your micromanagement of things.

The music isn’t great, it’s very average. It reminds me of Dying Light’s soundtrack with some meandering synth tones and 80s-ish vibes, but none of the tracks grabbed me and after awhile I actually began to find the music grating enough to just turn it off and listen to the Frostpunk soundtrack (or nothing at all) and enjoyed the game more as a result.

All-in-all the game for roughly 30 hours of my time, on sale for $15 bucks or so didn’t feel wasted. But there's better out there; Frostpunk, Dawn of Man, Age of Empires, etc. Those are the games I will and do come back to years later. (Especially AoE)

I don’t see much replayability at this point, there’s no variety in maps in terms of different regions i.e. swamps, actual deserts with palm trees and the like, islands, and so on. There’s no vehicles to make transport easier but with what’s currently in the game I guess it’d be unnecessary. There’s no wall-building to keep your town safer/create defensive chokepoints which is something I really like in strategy games, there’s no other settlements to come across and build relations with, the combat is much more of an annoyance than fun, and the music is a low-point.

This is a wait-for-sale kind of game. Given how many other, better strategy games are out there I have to compare them within their own genre and there’s others I would recommend over this. It isn't what I would recommend when someone asks me for a good strategy game, so, I don't recommend it.