Recent reviews by monkario

If you want to play a super simple, repetitive Xbox 360 game from 2013, this is the game for you.
I 100% this game in 100 hours, so I am heavily biased in recommending this game. The game is very janky, old, awkward, and a little stiff sometimes, but it has charm. I won't write about the story (avoiding spoilers), however the base game should only take 10 hours to complete (if you don't focus on achievements).

The core game play loop is as follows: get in a car, find a loot site, fill inventory with weapons and rifles, grab a rucksack of material, put sack in car, and go back to base. There are only four types of non-story events: save a community member on a scavenging run, create a distraction, hunting special zombies, or help a community member meet up for a trade. The most common events that do happen are the "save your community member" or hunting special zombies.

Items in your inventory can be stored in the storage locker, while the big rucksack you carry on your back (one at a time) is essentially a sub-currency to further advance buildings in your home base. The actual currency in the game (called Influence, indicated with a circled star) can only be gained by doing events, helping other communities, and depositing rucksacks to your base. Influence and building material are always required to create and upgrade each building.

Weapons are as follows: melee weapons, guns, consumables (molotovs, grenades, mines, healing items, and distracting tools). Melee weapons will have 5 boxes to indicate their quality; 1 being the lowest and easiest to break, 5 being the highest quality and last longer in combat. Guns don't have the same quality system, but their equivalent tier system would be pistols, shotguns, revolvers, bolt-action rifles, sub-machine guns, then automatic rifles. Rare weapons (.50 cal rifles, grenade launchers, light machine guns) would be better than automatic rifles, but have their own drawbacks along with harder to find ammo. Melee weapons and guns will have a yellow icon/outline above your mini-map when they're about to break.

The combat can be a little awkward at times. Sometimes you have to smack one zombie 10 times in a row before it gets staggered, sometimes you instantly stagger a zombie, and sometimes the zombie will get staggered but zoom across the map and alert a hoard of zombies to your location (not a joke). Another quirk/annoying thing about this game: you cannot be relatively far from zombies if you want to shoot and kill them, there seems to be extreme damage fall-off no matter the type of ammo or gun. I didn't use grenades or molotovs much, but it seems they have the same issue somehow.

*DLC*

BREAKDOWN: Same map as the base game, but no story. You must collect resources to fix an RV to "escape" the town. Each escape attempt makes the game harder. There are goals in this DLC that give you a little nudge in trying new things, but they're all based on the level of Breakdown you're on (i.e. Breakdown level 1 can only do 1st level things, Breakdown level 5 can do 5 and below, etc.). One goal you should try to get as early as possible is killing a sick community member. Otherwise, the DLC is boring for the first 4 levels since there are barely any game play changes, but any level afterwards increases the difficulty exponentially.
Overall, a boring DLC if you're not trying to 100% the game; plays similarly enough to the base game. 4/10.

LIFELINE: New map, based in a round city [compared to base game's three town structure]. You're playing as the military trying to rescue civilians, learn about the outbreak, and escape the city. The core loop of the game is nearly the same, but looting for resources is not mandatory now. You can call in resource drops and assistance (if you meet the requirements). However, every 30-ish minutes, your base gets swarmed by zombies and you have to protect it. 9/10 fun DLC.

F2P friendly gacha, very fun. PC port crashed often, I would not recommend playing on Steam until the port becomes more stable. Play on its designated platform (mobile).

I have almost 23 hours and 40/72 achievements for this game. I am trying to 100% this game.

With out completing the game yet, I can definitely say this game is not worth buying. The story is kinda interesting, but the combat, exploration, skills, inventory system, and map design is just so absolutely boring. There is nothing wrong, but everything is below average, it feels like a straight 3/10 game with how mediocre the game is.
Everything in this game feels like a hassle. The scrap vs materials sections you have to manage is awful; some item weights feel like they were randomly chosen, some items can be incredibly light (0.1kg) or they can be extremely heavy (3kg) when they should be near 1kg. Combat is very basic; left click to swing, hold right to block, level up and get a skill to shield bash... as far as I can see, that's it, but there are grenades and kunais as throwables.
There are also only like three songs in this game, not much to listen to besides the combat alert sound and ambient noise.

100% Completion Edit:

After 54 hours, I am done with the game. I still don't recommend it. It's still bad.

One of the worst in the series. I would not recommend this game even if you wanted to smash zombies. Does not have the same vibes as any of the other games.

Pros: driving through hoards is satisfying, leveling up your character does make you feel like there is real progression, *some* of the combo weapons are cool.

Cons: Hit registration is awful (especially explosion weapons leaving over half of the zombies within the blast radius unharmed and standing up undamaged), collision for zombies and the world is also horrible, you will get stuck on walls and door frames constantly, a zombie that has their back turned to you can still deal damage to you if you walk passed them, zombies can do half of your health as damage if they climb up ledges and you're near it, attacking has a weird lock-on assist that works like 30% of the time while the other 70% makes you angry, and everything in between.

I hate this game and all of its DLC.
First DLC: a golf minigame that is inconsistent with how the swing speed works. The golf ball either bounces like rubber or like a lead brick, resetting runs and landing in the same spot does not give the same results.
Second DLC: Frank turns into a zombie and blah blah. Combat is absolutely ATROCIOUS. It's genuinely an awful experience. I 100% the achievements, I got accustomed to the combat but it still feels like it's doing its best to be a horrible game.
Third DLC: Capcom super heroes. It's just the vanilla game with super suits that make you play like various Capcom characters. Frank's default "costume" feels bad, most of the other suits feel meh, and the only suit I liked was M. Bison. The base game issues obviously apply here which makes the boring suits feel worse.

Pretty good game, has a super good metal soundtrack.
Play with friends though.

This game absolutely sucks. Don't get it unless you want to fall in holes for the entire game.