In this zombie infested world created by Nah-Meen Studios, you have been accused of committing an unspeakable crime and banished by your colony to fend for yourself in the wild for at least 14 days to prove your innocence. After 14 days, if you can safely make it back to your home, the game is completed, and your high score will be compared against the top players in the leaderboard. You can, and will probably want to, prolong your punishment as long as possible to see how far you can go before you are utterly swarmed by zombies.
When searching for parts around the map, the game is a top-down dual stick shooter, with the left virtual stick to move the player and the right to swing or shoot your weapon. The controls work well overall, but there were times when the melee swings miss even when the enemy is right in front of the player, causing them to get injured and lose precious armor. You start with a simple crowbar, but there is a good number of different weapons to unlock. These weapons can also be leveled up to increase its effectiveness.
As you bash the skulls of flesh eating undead, you also gain experience points. These experience points are used to buy perks, which are added bonuses such as finding more parts or ammo in a supply or ammo crate, or increasing movement or shooting speed. Unfortunately, the player only gets to equip two weapons and two perks, so make sure you choose what is really important for your survival depending on different play styles. In a typical 14 day playthrough, it is impossible to finish unlocking all the weapons and perks, so it is another incentive to try to stay alive for as many days as you can.
Around the map, there are a few different places to go: the woods, suburbs, towns, and a bunker. Each area will take you about 5-10 minutes to clear depending on how thorough the player wants to be. If you kill all the zombies in an area, you get a bonus at the end. These give you extra ammo, parts, experience points, weapons or even perks. As this is a survival game, every single resource you can scrape together is vital.
As stated above, death is permanent, so expect to lose your player and everything he has gathered if you walk blindly into a horde of zombies, or if you accidentally stepped on your own mine (yes, that has happened to me). One of the more interesting features of this game is that you can scavenge other player’s remains when they die, and vice versa. This can be very useful to gain additional resources outside of just doing the usual runs. However, scavenging requires coins, the in-game currency you can either get by paying real money, or by taking part in the arena.
The arena basically pits the player against a never-ending swarm of zombies in an enclosed area just to see how many the player can kill before he or she gets overwhelmed and dies in a circle of undead. Every 80 or so zombies you kill nets you a single coin. By that time, however, things start to get really chaotic, so it is highly likely that you won’t get more than 2 or 3 coins per run. In the arena mode, weapons can only be unlocked by killing 250 zombies with each weapon in the survival “story” mode. With this, the developers have created a clever link between the two modes that complements each other.
If you find yourself pulling your hair and struggling to stay alive long enough to feel any kind of satisfaction, you can opt to buy several weapon kits available to help you start the game with an upper hand. The most interesting, and one which I am sure most people will consider spending their cash on, is Glitch, the companion dog that can be used to collect resources and protect you. For only $0.99, you won’t feel so lonely in this horrifying and cruel world. During my time with this game, I never felt it was necessary to buy anything, so freemium and IAP haters can calm down now.
Unfortunately, the game fails to elevate itself beyond an average title. There is not much variety in the different areas. They almost always include a few static cars, a couple of houses in the suburbs and towns, and that’s it. The game gets very repetitive to look at after a while because you feel like you’ve seen it all after the first few runs. You don’t find non-player characters (NPCs) or weapons or easter eggs or really anything that will make you say, “Hey, this is new”. The only thing that happens at random is smoke coming out of one of the points in the map that occurs every few days, and if you so happen to be in the vicinity, you can search the area to find a safehouse full of parts and ammo.
Even the enemies don’t differ much from one another. I think there may only be 2-3 kinds of zombies, but they don’t have any special traits, resistances or abilities. Also, unlike The Walking Dead, the sound of gunfire has no effect, as far as I can tell, on the attention of zombies around the area.
When I first played this game, I couldn’t make it back to my home because there was a horde waiting for me outside. I really wanted to go back, so I tried going through the horde, but I wasn’t ready at all. Dying only made me want to try again however, and I was more determined to make it back this time. After succeeding, I played through a third time because I wanted to try the more expensive and fun weapons, and I wanted to see how long I could last. Despite the lack of variety, and after three full-length playthroughs, I still want to go back and gather more resources and unlock weapons for the Arena. The game has got a lot of potential to be a great freemium title, but right now, it’s just a mediocre. I will be keeping this in my device in hopes that the developer decides to throw a huge update to this game.
