Seen this game on a digital distribution site, and reading its description, I fell in love with it instantly. Zombie apocalypse. Action-RPG. Random missions in a randomly generated town. Forming squads of rescued survivors then equip them with weapons to help you while you search for other survivors, food, tools, base-building materials, weapons and ammo. Training survivors in combat, carpentry, medicine and other skills and keep them happy and well-fed, at least so that they wouldn't find the company of zombies more favorable than yours. Build and upgrade the defenses of your base (traps, barricades) from the materials you find in town.
Yikes, if it's not the game of the millennium I don't know what could be! Well, sadly, it isn't.
The most obvious issue is graphics. The game is ugly. And has about the same fps as Crysis.... Okay, I have a good old Pentium4 D (that means: single core with hyperthreading), but I bet games from P3 era are better looking than Fort Zombie. No kidding. Very low polycount, medium quality textures, almost no effects, and I still get fps lower than 10 most of the time.
I won't write about sounds, because there are almost no sounds. Your ears will get the absolute minimum treatment.
The controls are ... interesting. I wouldn't say it's crap, because if you give the game an hour you'll get used to it, but sometimes you'll question the human origins of the designers.
The AI is quite simple, which could be satisfying taking into account that your enemies are mindless walking chewmachines, but unfortunately your supposedly more intelligent companions could do the same mistakes (not being able to avoid obstacles, for example), which could really hinder teamworking with them.
All in all, Fort Zombie is not a shining diamond of the gaming world; if you take into consideration only how the game looks like, it should hardly get a score of 2. I admit, when I first played it, I quickly uninstalled and swore to never buy a low-budget game again. Next day I reinstalled it, played a bit, and then deleted it cursing myself for not being smart enough to learn from my first experience. So why have I given it a 5? Because it got installed the third time, and stayed on my HD for a few weeks. I played it everyday, and begun to enjoy it, however not so to play it to the end. The basic idea, and the atmosphere saved the game for me, even so that I think after I finish the review I'll install it again.
Hypothetically you get 14 days to build up the defenses of your chosen base to endure the massive assault when those two weeks expire. If you survive that, you won. (Never got there; the saves are in plain text format, and I always rewrote the current time, so it was always Day 2 for me...) In the meantime you get 3-4 available missions everyday to gather food, supplies, weapons and survivors. You can't do every one of them, because you have only around (can't remember exactly) 16 hours per day to act, and you have to get to the scene, then do the chosen mission, then get back to base, and it all takes time. If you already rescued some survivors, you can assign them on various tasks: base-building, repairing broken equipment, healing the wounded, or you can take them with you on the missions for some extra firepower (not exactly advised, but with some micromanagement it can be done) or as packmules (which is a more sensible and time-saving decision).
Once you get to the scene of your chosen mission, pause the game. Really. On many occasions there will be a few zombies who see you, and will attack after a few seconds. And it's time to mention a few things about them. First, they are _hard_ to kill. Headshots are very effective, but to achieve that you need a decent skill in your chosen weapon, and a good amount of luck because of the controls. Second, even those who don't see you still can _hear_ you. So even if you kill a single attacking zombie, the noise of the weapons can draw a much larger mob to you. Oh, and they are not only tough guys, they are also fast... So, basically, no matter how much ammo you have, your best option is always to run from cover to cover. When they don't see you, and are not too close, they will forget you.
Running out of space, so a few tips.
- When you're on a rescue mission, reach the survivor(s) as fast as you can, because the zombies target them as well if they see them. (A bug: sometimes the survivors spawn in the same room with some zombies. In that case, you can't be fast enough, but the game won't tell you....) - Avoid the military zombies if you can. They have firearms, and they are not afraid to use them, but on the plus side they are not exactly sharpshooters....
- If you absolutely must fight (which will happen, especially near your objectives), kill the medic zombies first if present, or else they will reanimate their fallen comrades.
- A reminder: the saves are in plain text format... *wink-wink*…Full Review »
Fort Zombie has great potential and I believe that with a little more effort on the designer's behalf, it could be turned into a functional game. At the moment it is ugly, unoptimized and painfully difficult to control. The game has been out for three years but it seems like the designers have abandoned it. Shame on Paradox for releasing a game in this state. The basic premise is that you are a survivor with a certain set of skills (which you can configure at the start of the game) that has to lead other survivors to his fort to build up a sort of resistance. Survivors bring their own skills to the table as well. Every day you are allowed to execute a few missions, when 14 days are over, your fort will be attacked and if it holds; you will have won the game. There are three "campaigns" to choose from, each more difficult than the former. I'd write more about it but I can't, the low FPS count and unintuitive RSI-inducing controls forced me to stop playing.…Full Review »
