About Survival Zombie Tycoon:
After 100 hours of playing Dead Age 1 and Dead Age 2, I would personally recommend picking up and trying out the game if you check these three boxes (Which lucky for me, I do): 1.) You are a fan of turn based RPG’s 2.) You like Zombie games 3.) You enjoy those old text-based adventure style flash games Other than that I wouldn’t recommend you get the game because you’ll probably get tired of the combat pretty fast, the story is mediocre at best, and the survival/rpg elements are done decently but not enough to keep you playing just from those alone. My biggest complaint is that for a turn based RPG, the combat is not deep, you have very few options, several enemies are just annoying, and random encounters are too repetitive. So how is the combat simple? Well, each turn you generate 2 AP (action points) and every move used will consume 1-4 AP. Basic attacks consume 1 AP and 1 ammo for pistol/shotgun or 3 ammo for rifles. The theory is that more powerful moves will consume more AP and more ammo, but will be better than just using a basic attack. In practice, you will never need to use the more powerful moves because they consume MUCH more ammo than a basic attack, and they aren’t actually more useful than just doing several basic attacks. Not only that, but you have to fully specialize all skill points into a specific combat tree to unlock those “better” moves. For me personally, I found that the best abilities were actually the first few you unlock as they can be used with 1 or 2 AP (meaning they can be used on the first round). In this game, burning down enemies before they can get off their annoying abilities is a much better strategy than trying to save up your AP to do the “power” moves. So, how is combat annoying? Well, for starters, this game uses a “row” system where you have to “switch rows” to the front row if you want to use melee weapons (and you will because it helps conserve ammo). Now, this system by itself isn’t annoying and maybe it does add depth, however, it’s silly that there is no preset formation to allow more than a single character to start out on the front row. Why is that annoying? Because switching rows consumes 1 AP, meaning, not only do you waste time EVERY SINGLE FIGHT switching at least 2 of your characters into melee range, but it also takes their AP so now they only get 1 AP to use on round 1. On top of that, several enemies can attack you when you switch rows as a PASSIVE ability they get (it doesn’t make the fights deeper, just annoying), and several enemies can knock you back to the back row with their attacks (meaning you now have to switch back to the front row to get back into melee range and it uses some of your AP). They also added in this kind of silly thing on pistols and rifles where if you are in the front row, you cannot attack front row enemies with their basic attacks. The next reason why the combat is annoying is the random encounters. Random encounters occur as you move along the map. You get 8hrs in the day/night to move across the map and every time you move one space it consumes 30 minutes. As you are moving, you have a high chance to start a random encounter. Almost every random encounter will be you being attacked be something, usually zombies. At the start of the game it doesn’t feel too bad, but by day 40 when all you want to do is hop on that subway and go move the story mission forward, being ambushed by punks/scavs for the 6th time can get very annoying. I’m not saying they need to remove random encounters altogether, but it needs toned down, especially because of how the day/night exploration works, which I’ll bring up in my Side Complaint section. Side Complaint: As my first side complaint, I don’t understand why the game FORCES you to return to camp after 8 hrs exploring in the day, but then immediately allows you to explore another 8 hrs at night. The only thing this feature accomplishes is to force you to start re-exploring every 8 hrs from the camp again (and then you get to deal with more random encounters, YAY!) As my second side complaint, it’s kind of silly how a lot of the base upgrades are useless or at the very least, very underwhelming (hunting stand upgrades, comm station upgrades, sleeping room upgrades, med station upgrades, guard post upgrades) and that most of the talent trees are not worth actually maxing out. For example, I already went into why most of the combat tree upgrades are not worth getting past the first few levels. As another example of a non-combat tree talent not worth upgrading, the gardener job is actually better to have 2 level 1 gardeners than it is to have a level 3 gardener (you use the same amount of seeds and get more food/water) so there is really no point in leveling up folks past level 1 gardening. Third side complaint, please do something to tone done annoying enemies. I already mentioned enemies that attack you when you switch rows (you could fix that by moving it from a passive ability to an activated one), now I’ll bring up Foremans. These guys aren’t hard, just annoying. They are annoying because they use an ability that gives them 100% chance to block all attacks for 2 rounds (which they usually keep up indefinitely). All this does is drag the fight out for several more rounds than needed while your team chips away at his hp. You could fix that by making Foremans only able to block one type of attack (melee or ranged ONLY not both). Another annoying enemy is the Suits. Every turn they get to summon a crawler when attacked, which gets old. Crawlers are not hard and all this ability really does is pad out the fight and make it last several more turns that it should have. You could fix that by putting a 2 crawler cap on how many they can summon. (and remove the ability to summon a crawler when they get killed) As my final side complaint, the way healing works in this game should probably be re-thought, and let me go over why. Firstly, during combat ANY character can go into the inventory and use AS MANY healing items as they want ON AS MANY PEOPLE as they want all for only 1 AP. This essentially means that at any point you can full heal your entire party for 1 measly AP. This makes buying/crafting higher level medkits useless (because you can just use as many tier 1 medkits, burgers, or sodas as you want) and they are better because they have more flexibility with the amount of health you want to get back. For example, I always keep my party above 70% and never let them fall below 30% because they can be randomly infected if you let them fall below 30%. Now, with the large medkits you lose this kind of control and its much harder to be resource and hp efficient. However, they could balance that by making each healing item consume AP, or something like that, that way using a large medkit in battle would be useful as it would now be a trade off with AP efficiency vs resource and hp efficiency.
