Endzone - A World Apart

Pretty much APOCALYPTIC Banished. Steep learning curve on balancing everything. Not for the beginner with No level setting IE: Easy, Medium, Hard. No control of environmental disasters. Definitely needs some fine tuning. Almost seems as though they rushed the release as it's almost impossible to have a successful game.

The setting is really entirely lost. This could be skinned in any way and be the same game. The post apocalypic concept is not relevant or noticable. The tutorial is aweful, one of the worst I have ever seen. It does a very poor job of actually leading you through the game mechanics. You wind up having to dig around for the real information that it fails to teach you. The manual is poorly organized as well, so together this makes for a painful learning experience. The pace is very slow. Even once you figure out there are speed controls that the tutorial fails to mention at any point. The reason it's slow is the workers are a bunch of slackers that continually just don't do their jobs. Farmers stand around idle instead of farming. Builders stand around not building things you've asked for. The build process is not explained. Building placement impacts are not explained. There is seemingly no logic or impact to the water levels that are never explained (outside of a drought which stops all food sources). Workers assigned to things that can no longer be done do nothing, but workers assigned to nothing will find things to do if you say there are things to do. It's the worst kind of micromanagement with no red flags. The graphics are hard to look at. Basically it has the resolution of a game that is 20 years old so there is a lot of pixel noise. It's not crisp, it's not clear what is going on when there's scrap in a forest, you can barely make out the settlers, etc. It's basically a SimCity with a side of Farmville. There is no excitement here. There is no real threat to survival. The strategy is minimal. Even on 90% discount I'm left disapointed that I wasted the time on this.

This game is in the same league as Banished, Frostpunk, and (to go deep into its dna) Dwarf Fortress. I personally like the game a lot. I like the different setting and mechanics introduced. In addition to the usual problems with weather, raiders, food, and production lines; you now have to worry about radiation. I haven't gotten any of the DLC yet but they look promising. Once I've played through what the base game offers I totally plan on picking up the DLC and giving that a spin also. I am a fan of these types of games. If you didn't like Banished or Frostpunk or any of the city management games, then you probably wouldn't like this one either. YMMV. If you are unsure, I say, go for it. I hope you enjoy this game as much as I do.

It looks and runs good, that's about the best I can say about this game. The main issue I have with this game is how bad it is at communicating important information to the player. You have a set of resources. You mouse over them and it shows you only the amount you have and the resource limit you set - which is not the same as storage limit, which is not shown. The amount produced per cycle is not shown either, gotta search for that somewhere in the menus maybe, or calculate manually from your buildings. And so on. As such, it is unnecessarily hard to figure out what is going on in regards to production. Time and time again, I found myself overproducing certain resources and lacking in others, but I wouldn't find out about it until my resource levels started falling down rapidly. Unnecessary micromanagement is another issue. You have zones where resource gathering buldings gather them. They are a set circle you have to manually move. No way to enlarge them, no way to paint your own zones, no. Again, you find out when the resources start running out. Whoever thought this was a good idea should not be designing gameplay systems. And I could go on. Game has a lot of interesting systems, but it also tries to reinvent the wheel all the time on gameplay mechanics that have been basically perfected over the years. Unfortunately, generally it's making the experience worse.

This game has the longest and most boring tutorial that I've ever seen. I thought about quiting many times during this tutorial, but if you can withstand it, the game itself is pretty enjoyable and bug free (at least from my experience). I think it is worth buying if you like games like Frostpunk and Banished and want to try something new.