I've been gaming long enough to remember the original Baldur's Gate from when it was released. It defined what a great RPG was at the time. Larian Studios has captured a lot of that magic, in a scope that will often feel like you've sat down at the table with simply too much to eat. This is good or bad depending on your perspective. I happen to be enjoying it. I'm roughly 70 hours into the game as of this review and that means I've spent less than $1 per hour of fun I've had. That's a successful game for me. For all that time, I think I'm about 50% of the way through Act 2 going by the size of the map. I enjoy exploring every nook and cranny, completing every side quest and storyline. This game absolutely rewards that kind of neurotic hunting. Using the ALT key highlights chests and corpses, but using your eyes shows a whole lot more. Mundane things have less of a chance of something interesting in them, but I find a lot of quest clues, keys, and miscellaneous items inside objects and lying out on the ground that the game wasn't pointing me at with a big "Click Here" box. I have not had the same complaints so many have had about combat being too hard or too cheesy. I've enjoyed it. I don't abuse the heck out of the mechanics and got tired of spending time "dipping" my weapons pretty quickly. Shove is pretty darn overpowered as a free action, but a lot of fun too. Around being at the whim of the RNG - I loved XCOM, and this has nothing on that. It's not quite D&D 5e, which is okay. It's not quite the original Baldur's Gate. It is a great RPG on its own. It's got compelling storylines and characters all over the place. It's dense - every turn brings something to find, someone to help or hinder, or a fight to keep things rolling. It's a very rich RPG experience. I'd like to personally thank Larian Studios, too, for giving me an opportunity to collect hundreds of rotten food items, forks and knives, cups and plates, bones and rags - and sell them at a profit.
Quickest summary: Isometric twin-shooter zombie survival and crafting game. Better summary: "This is how you die" isn't a joke. Death will take you and often when you least expect it. Maybe you're just rummaging around in a kitchen and suddenly the five zombies you accidentally alerted will swarm you from behind. Maybe you drive too recklessly and destroy your car, crippling yourself and making escape impossible. Maybe you play too late into the night and fall asleep at your computer while making soup out of dead mice and old bread and burn your house down with you in it. PZ lets you customize your play to your liking with detailed game settings in Sandbox, scenarios, mods, and as many or more options as I've seen in any other game. If you're looking for a brutal apocalypse that you're lucky to survive for a week, you can have that. If you're looking for a sim where you set a more casual pace and explore the world, you can do that too. Crank up the zombie spawns, make them all runners, shut off zombie spawns entirely and try to clear out areas, or set it so you only die if you get bleed out. Lots of drivable cars everywhere? Nothing but broken-down wrecks? No problem. PZ is all about you defining what you find fun and going with it. The risk vs. reward vs. repetition is entirely up to you. You don't have to be a hermit farming in a remote wilderness. You could take over five city blocks and defend them. You could be a pillaging nomad that never settles down. When you die you could run back to your base and collect all your spare gear and just keep going with a new character - or you could roll up a new survivor in a new world and try to beat your own personal record for surviving. I've been playing this game off and on for over three years and it continues to get better.
If it's not a download, it doesn't belong on this site. I can get all my map info online for free. Maybe in a less consolidated format, but at zero cost.
I'm a huge fan of all things squad-based, turn-based, and tactical. I picked this up mostly to see what it was about. Going into this, I wanted to like the game. Don't glance at FTL when considering this game. It has nothing in common there except a superficial similarity in the meta game. If this game had come out in the early 90's before XCOM, it would have set the gold standard for tactical combat. Sadly, it comes out in late 2018 amid a field full of superior tactical squad games - and it dares to be mediocre by those standards. It doesn't bring anything really fresh or new to the table. It checks a lot of boxes. Squad combat. Tactical. Turn-based. Rogue-like. Equipment earned carries over from one play through to the next. There is small innovation in having the squad semi-intelligently follow a single leader, but that's a solution to a problem the game itself creates in forcing everyone to move each turn across larger maps. Where it falls right down flat on its face is repetition. The game re-uses - over and over - the same mix of set pieces and tiles to randomly generate every single mission. After a couple hours of play, I was pretty confident I had seen almost everything the game could throw at me, and none of it made me say "Oh, cool!" ... instead I just got to chew on the same cardboard visuals again and again. Maybe there were subtle differences in the color palette? I didn't check. I just got really bored really fast as it felt like I was doing the exact same thing on repeat. Having to start a mission over from the beginning - or the entire game - if you botch a mission and wipe your crew doesn't help alleviate that feeling. So - in summary - it's a good effort, but dry and repetitive. Technically proficient, but not outstanding.
I have this on CD and I spent hours playing this game and almost enjoying it. The mechanics work, the game wants to engage you, there's something here. The problem I had was that the game never clicked with me. I kept feeling like the fun would start any time now and kept pushing forward because I was almost there - almost, but not quite ever. It's a hard feeling to explain; I wanted to like the game, I played the game, I didn't dislike the game - but it never felt like it was getting good. Everything remained lackluster for me until I gave up after a few days of picking at it and trying to find the fun inside. It might be there for other people. I can't say "Stay away from this game" nor can I say "Wow, you've got to play this" ... thus the '3' rating - neutral.
