Never did like kids.
Now here's a game you probably haven't ever heard of, but it's from an indie developer you might know of. Ska Studios, back then simply known as James Silva. I've said about Ska that they've never made a bad game, and the same applies to this early title of theirs. While it has it's quirks, bugs and some inconvenient over-looks, this is definitely a game worth trying, playing, and best of all it's free now!
Survival Crisis Z offers to throw you into a good old zombie apocalypse... or at least that's what it seems like at first, and it does this with two modes of play. Story Mode, or Arcade Mode. We'll start with the latter. In this Arcade mode you take your character, and are thrust into a random portion of the city to fend yourself off against wave after wave of increasingly deadly hordes of zombies and whatever other creatures the game wants to throw at you. You will do this by mostly shooting them, but you will pick up special guns, and powerups to help fend yourself from the zombies. The powerups can even be stored for later use, though only one at a time. The funniest of these is a shopping cart. This turns you into a high-speed, invincible death-mobile of a man sitting inside a shopping cart. It's crazy fun, and this isn't the only powerup of it's kind. Other special things in Arcade mode usually come in the form of wave-specific mutators. Some waves will suddenly make everything dark so you can't see behind you. Some waves will cause fat exploding zombies to rush you en masse. And some will even cause the spot you stand on to become a hill, making it harder for the zombies to get at you, and this hill will move with you. It's interesting to watch the landscape warp in such a way.
After a while, Arcade mode will get brutally hard, but as you earn more and more points the game will give you rewards. You can even unlock a cute little Tetris-style minigame, but the most significant of these, is the ability to customize your character's appearance. From a humble businessman, to a burnt SWAT member literally missing his face. So no doubt Arcade mode is where you wanna go for a quick monster-murdering romp, and it's also where you want to go FIRST, to get used to the games controls.
So now let's move onto the serious bulk in the game, and that starts right as you boot it up. When you start a new character, the game will ask you your name, gender, and then more importantly it'll ask you what class you'd like to start as. The difference between them being that they all have different starting abilities, but they can all be evolved to the same point. You always have access to all the skills no matter who you start as. I went with the Doctor, because regenerating health and a high-power revolver is a godsend. Finally, the game will also ask you what faction you would like to be in. Neutral, Rebels or SWAT. The last two of those are two human organizations who have begun warring against each-other while Neutrals are just people indifferent to both sides. Yknow, typical zombie apocalypse stuff. All of this stuff will determine how you start out, your disposition towards the factions and how they act to you, and of course your appearance which you'll want to change if you have unlocked it in Arcade Mode. Once you've done all that wonderful picking, select Story Mode and you'll have a choice of three episodes. I'd of course go with Episode One to start off but if you're feeling brave...
So now you've chosen your starting corners. After a small, cryptic and slightly unnerving opening cutscene, you will suddenly (and I mean suddenly) find yourself in the middle of a street, inside a small randomly-generated town with no clue as to what you should be doing. This is the games most crippling point, is that it boots you out the front door on your ass and expects you to know things. So you'll find yourself wandering around town for a bit, shooting a few zombies here and there once you figure out the controls, and eventually, you'll come across a dude with a knife inside a building. He'll come up to you, spend about five minutes explaining a bunch of stuff like he's the god of knowledge, telling you not to waste your ammo, and to go do safehouse missions. This becomes irrelevant as soon as he starts running into zombies trying to be knife Rambo.
But this guy is your first partner and you're stuck with him until he dies; this is just one of many features the game has. The game is technically free roam, and to progress with the story, you must do story-based missions. This can be done two ways, but the factions are what you need to get to these, so lets explore the organizations first. Rebels and SWAT are self explanatory, and both factions own buildings throughout the city, as do Neutral parties. For each safehouse of these three factions there is a leader. This is the important guy. You
can talk to him for missions, guns, items, and even skills you can buy. You receive money for all these by completing missions, or finding money conveniently placed throughout the world in suitcases or dead corpses along with other items. For Rebel or SWAT buildings, you can talk to this man to do side-quests that ally yourself with that faction, while making you a target to the other one. If you talk to the leader of an enemy faction, you can bribe him to take the bounty off your head if you wish; Though if you've heavily invested yourself into either side, this becomes extremely expensive. So decide wisely, or decide neither.
Even if you decide to side with someone though, Neutrals are still neccessary to your success, as they're one of the only ways to unlock story missions. The way you do this is to go to the leader of a Neutral safehouse, and request a job. This usually consists of taking a package, or taking a person to another safehouse in a limited time. You have plenty of time to do this, and when you're done, you earn a profit based on usually the distance from point A to point B. When you return the package/person to the point B safehouse leader, if he's Neutral (which is most of the time) then you can finally request a story mission, and as you progress further and further through the stories, you'll eventually come to the end of an episode, and once you finish an episode you move onto the next, randomly generated plot of city. This is how you progress through the game, but it's not the only thing you can do.
In case you've been wondering, there is another faction... and it's you. If you so wish to, you can waltz on into a safehouse, talk to the leader and pick an option to start a takeover. For neutral safehouses, you'll be fighting off a brutal onslaught of zombies, and usually the smaller the room is, the worse off you'll be. For SWAT or Rebels, you'll be doing a hostile takeover, killing waves and waves of their members until the house is yours. In either case, you're shown the difficulty level before you confirm you want to do this, and you will have to use all your skills, survival ability, and any items necessary to survive because these mini-game wave fights are an absolute gauntlet to get through. Tesla-balls and turret sentries are your friends more than anything else. But once you do become successful, the house belongs to you, and now you've opened up the game to so much more.
In addition to being able to access story missions instantly, and sleep for free, you can now draw in profit, and better NPC partners to your side. As you take over more, and more buildings, you have three factors that go up with each one. Profit, how many NPC's you have, and how good their weapons are. All the way from getting 2 cents for killing a zombie, and maybe having one guy with a knife - to getting tens of dollars from every zombie kill and always being gauranteed to have a four-man posse of flamethrower and heavy machine gun wielding badasses. But don't get too attached to these badasses. While it's easy enough to keep them alive with medkits, if you're rushed by an incredibly fast and sudden wave of zombies or other creatures, your partners can dissapear in the blink of an eye, until you re
cognize their mangled corpse attempting to take a bite out of you. As well as, should a partner be badly injured and you can't help them with it, you may well find yourself having to listen to them talk about not feeling well, and eventually begin vomiting up blood. If you can't heal them they'll become a zombie coming to eat your flesh, and a fast one at that. It's especially saddening to lose one because the NPC's have their own personalities. Sometimes they don't get along, while other times, they get along so well you want them to make it through the whole, long episode alive with you so they can escape and get married and all that sappy stuff. Once they get mobbed by a bunch of zombies coming from a window, it's sad, and disappointing but that's something great to be had in this game.
Of course, you may feel a little less bad for them if you pay attention to their AI. You'll find that they may like to run headfirst into a group of zombies when they only have a knife, or they might fumble trying to get around a wall and get close to you again when you've moved on from one building. But these issues become second-nature to accept when you're on your fifth successive survivor cause the others die, and that's actually quite the problem. You'll find that your survivors die even more because, while you can achieve better-equipped survivors, these badasses must be new. Older ones can't be re-equipped, so whatever weapon you find them with is whatever they're permanently stuck with. It feels kind of bad to have to drive two knife-wielding innocents into a mob of zombies so they'll die and open up space for someone with a better gun.They also tend to get themselves killed because they must stand still to talk. While reading the nice snippets of conversation they have to offer can be nice, them stopping abruptly leaves them a sitting duck for hungry mouths and they aren't exactly sensitive about when they choose to speak. So just let your first couple die off till you can find ones with big shinies.
And these problems of overlooked design don't stop there. When you swap over an episode, you'll lose all your buildings, profits and other stats except your inventory and skills from the last episode. So really, there's no point in doing a bunch of buildings until you're on the last episode. And finally, beware this; When you do the absolute final mission, you can't go back into the game. Your screen will forever be stuck in a black limbo until you restart a new character. So once you've had one run-through, you should make your way through the game up until the last mission, then do all your free-roaming building-stealing fun.
So, fun! I've spent too long not talking about the gameplay so here goes. Survival Crisis Z is presented as a shooter from an isometric angle. I'd recommend goofing with the options until you can get a WASD and Mouse combination working, because the game becomes too hectic to play otherwise. Hectic it is, and it is oh so satisfying. You'll start out with basically one type of enemy, and that's z
ombies. You'll fight either old, decayed slow zombies, or the fresh ones. The ones that have recently been turned. These ones are fast, and vicious because they haven't had time to decay. As you move on you'll begin encountering more paranormal enemies... and places. One of my favourites being the "children". These are crazy little buggers that you can't see. Until they're really close to you, then they appear, and your entire world transforms into an insane asylum until you move away from the ankle-biters, or kill them. So if you're surrounded by a good mob of them you're likely to start feeling a little uncomfortable because you'll be running away, panicking and the world will constantly be changing around you. These are a very unique, fun enemy and the game is full of these.
The game also tends to do paranormal things around you. For example, you'll be exploring an empty room, exit it, then come back inside immediately and you'll find the room flooded with a mob of crazy zombies that want to eat your flesh. Or you'll be exiting a safehouse - all of which are normally devoid of undead life - and suddenly a huge swarm of flesh hungry monsters comes bursting out of the door you just left and into the streets when they had nowhere to come from in the first place. It seems like an accidental loophole in game design, but it's honestly a good one and it keeps you on your toes.
So to fight these threats, you'll have many, MANY things at your disposal. From a handgun, revolver, shotgun, all the way to a military-grade heavy machine gun, or the ever-so-deadly flamethrower. These are easy to access in your inventory, because when you pull up your inventory it pauses your game. Here you have multiple sections to your HUD, three of which are interactive. Up top is your items. These consist of smokes, bombs, health, small food items, and even things you can mix and combine to create useful items or dangerous drugs. In the middle is your weapon and health wheel. You'll cycle through your weapons with directional buttons, and the red circle surrounding them represents your health. Try not to let this go down. On this screen you can also see how much ammo you have for each gun. Third, we have the skills section. Here you can view and use your skills that you have bought from safehouse leaders. Some of these are passive, while instant-use ones will show you what items you require to use them. These range from running fast, all the way to sentry turrets, and making C4 that can literally blow up an entire building.
Finally, we have the other miscellaneous stuff, like fatigue, hunger and your commodities. If your fatigue and hunger become far too low, you'll notice your character become slow, and your screen will begin twitching as a sign of unfocus. While it takes a long time to die of hunger, being brought down to a snails pace is deadly in itself, so you must sleep and eat to keep these going. This brings me to commodities. These consist of things like Food, Electronics, and a couple other things I forgot. Food is used automatically once your hunger hits zero to prevent it going negative, so always keep a healthy stock of food. The other commodities are used to make items, or initiate skills. One skill allows you to craft items out of commodities, while another lets you randomly disassemble your inventory into usable coms. The game is well thought out, and all in all it's presented simply, and usable. But, not user-friendly as it can take a while to figure out how the whole experience works.
Aesthetically wise, the game boasts a good, believable and properly disturbing audio track, all the way from the screeching white noise of the world changing around you, to the good loud bang of a gun (and it certainly is a bang) and of course the shuffling of good ol' zombies. But graphically... well, it's not gonna break the game. Some of the textures are good and pleasing, but sprites and such are cartoonish, and honestly downright ugly at times; And this is all spread out over a very repetitive world where buildings are not memorable, and you'll be checking your map constantly. Still, even if the graphics are bad, the game does show some creativity with it's artistic direction. The console menu is always in an LED-style red print with static overtop of it, and it's charming despite the actual graphic capability. These factors don't hurt the game for me, but if graphics are a big deal for you this is something you'll have to fight your way through to get at the sweet, delicious game candy.
Finally, the game boasts a rather unique system of dungeons. Occasionally you will come across a random grate in a room. This is a rare chance, and when you do come across it, you have to decide whether to enter it now, or never. When you leave the room, the grate will disappear so you can't go off and prepare yourself for the trials underneath. So, do you think you're ready? Cause if you are, and if you happen to survive the dungeons' dangerous halls, then you'll be heftily rewarded. From some real good amounts of items, to even very very special, secret items.
FINAL SAY:
Survival Crisis Z boasts almost perfection over the concept of a zombie apocalypse and even throws in some crazy paranormal twists in here and there. It had some design flaws and things that seem carelessly overlooked, but if you know what you're doing the game will love you and you'll love it back. So prepare yourself to face some seriously dangerous, paranormal and flesh-eating monsters as you fight your way through this apocalypse, not to mention the dangerous humans that may fire upon you depending on what you've done. So download it now right here! It's free!
Survival Crisis Z offers to throw you into a good old zombie apocalypse... or at least that's what it seems like at first, and it does this with two modes of play. Story Mode, or Arcade Mode. We'll start with the latter. In this Arcade mode you take your character, and are thrust into a random portion of the city to fend yourself off against wave after wave of increasingly deadly hordes of zombies and whatever other creatures the game wants to throw at you. You will do this by mostly shooting them, but you will pick up special guns, and powerups to help fend yourself from the zombies. The powerups can even be stored for later use, though only one at a time. The funniest of these is a shopping cart. This turns you into a high-speed, invincible death-mobile of a man sitting inside a shopping cart. It's crazy fun, and this isn't the only powerup of it's kind. Other special things in Arcade mode usually come in the form of wave-specific mutators. Some waves will suddenly make everything dark so you can't see behind you. Some waves will cause fat exploding zombies to rush you en masse. And some will even cause the spot you stand on to become a hill, making it harder for the zombies to get at you, and this hill will move with you. It's interesting to watch the landscape warp in such a way.
After a while, Arcade mode will get brutally hard, but as you earn more and more points the game will give you rewards. You can even unlock a cute little Tetris-style minigame, but the most significant of these, is the ability to customize your character's appearance. From a humble businessman, to a burnt SWAT member literally missing his face. So no doubt Arcade mode is where you wanna go for a quick monster-murdering romp, and it's also where you want to go FIRST, to get used to the games controls.
So now let's move onto the serious bulk in the game, and that starts right as you boot it up. When you start a new character, the game will ask you your name, gender, and then more importantly it'll ask you what class you'd like to start as. The difference between them being that they all have different starting abilities, but they can all be evolved to the same point. You always have access to all the skills no matter who you start as. I went with the Doctor, because regenerating health and a high-power revolver is a godsend. Finally, the game will also ask you what faction you would like to be in. Neutral, Rebels or SWAT. The last two of those are two human organizations who have begun warring against each-other while Neutrals are just people indifferent to both sides. Yknow, typical zombie apocalypse stuff. All of this stuff will determine how you start out, your disposition towards the factions and how they act to you, and of course your appearance which you'll want to change if you have unlocked it in Arcade Mode. Once you've done all that wonderful picking, select Story Mode and you'll have a choice of three episodes. I'd of course go with Episode One to start off but if you're feeling brave...
So now you've chosen your starting corners. After a small, cryptic and slightly unnerving opening cutscene, you will suddenly (and I mean suddenly) find yourself in the middle of a street, inside a small randomly-generated town with no clue as to what you should be doing. This is the games most crippling point, is that it boots you out the front door on your ass and expects you to know things. So you'll find yourself wandering around town for a bit, shooting a few zombies here and there once you figure out the controls, and eventually, you'll come across a dude with a knife inside a building. He'll come up to you, spend about five minutes explaining a bunch of stuff like he's the god of knowledge, telling you not to waste your ammo, and to go do safehouse missions. This becomes irrelevant as soon as he starts running into zombies trying to be knife Rambo.
But this guy is your first partner and you're stuck with him until he dies; this is just one of many features the game has. The game is technically free roam, and to progress with the story, you must do story-based missions. This can be done two ways, but the factions are what you need to get to these, so lets explore the organizations first. Rebels and SWAT are self explanatory, and both factions own buildings throughout the city, as do Neutral parties. For each safehouse of these three factions there is a leader. This is the important guy. You
can talk to him for missions, guns, items, and even skills you can buy. You receive money for all these by completing missions, or finding money conveniently placed throughout the world in suitcases or dead corpses along with other items. For Rebel or SWAT buildings, you can talk to this man to do side-quests that ally yourself with that faction, while making you a target to the other one. If you talk to the leader of an enemy faction, you can bribe him to take the bounty off your head if you wish; Though if you've heavily invested yourself into either side, this becomes extremely expensive. So decide wisely, or decide neither.Even if you decide to side with someone though, Neutrals are still neccessary to your success, as they're one of the only ways to unlock story missions. The way you do this is to go to the leader of a Neutral safehouse, and request a job. This usually consists of taking a package, or taking a person to another safehouse in a limited time. You have plenty of time to do this, and when you're done, you earn a profit based on usually the distance from point A to point B. When you return the package/person to the point B safehouse leader, if he's Neutral (which is most of the time) then you can finally request a story mission, and as you progress further and further through the stories, you'll eventually come to the end of an episode, and once you finish an episode you move onto the next, randomly generated plot of city. This is how you progress through the game, but it's not the only thing you can do.
In case you've been wondering, there is another faction... and it's you. If you so wish to, you can waltz on into a safehouse, talk to the leader and pick an option to start a takeover. For neutral safehouses, you'll be fighting off a brutal onslaught of zombies, and usually the smaller the room is, the worse off you'll be. For SWAT or Rebels, you'll be doing a hostile takeover, killing waves and waves of their members until the house is yours. In either case, you're shown the difficulty level before you confirm you want to do this, and you will have to use all your skills, survival ability, and any items necessary to survive because these mini-game wave fights are an absolute gauntlet to get through. Tesla-balls and turret sentries are your friends more than anything else. But once you do become successful, the house belongs to you, and now you've opened up the game to so much more.
In addition to being able to access story missions instantly, and sleep for free, you can now draw in profit, and better NPC partners to your side. As you take over more, and more buildings, you have three factors that go up with each one. Profit, how many NPC's you have, and how good their weapons are. All the way from getting 2 cents for killing a zombie, and maybe having one guy with a knife - to getting tens of dollars from every zombie kill and always being gauranteed to have a four-man posse of flamethrower and heavy machine gun wielding badasses. But don't get too attached to these badasses. While it's easy enough to keep them alive with medkits, if you're rushed by an incredibly fast and sudden wave of zombies or other creatures, your partners can dissapear in the blink of an eye, until you re
cognize their mangled corpse attempting to take a bite out of you. As well as, should a partner be badly injured and you can't help them with it, you may well find yourself having to listen to them talk about not feeling well, and eventually begin vomiting up blood. If you can't heal them they'll become a zombie coming to eat your flesh, and a fast one at that. It's especially saddening to lose one because the NPC's have their own personalities. Sometimes they don't get along, while other times, they get along so well you want them to make it through the whole, long episode alive with you so they can escape and get married and all that sappy stuff. Once they get mobbed by a bunch of zombies coming from a window, it's sad, and disappointing but that's something great to be had in this game.Of course, you may feel a little less bad for them if you pay attention to their AI. You'll find that they may like to run headfirst into a group of zombies when they only have a knife, or they might fumble trying to get around a wall and get close to you again when you've moved on from one building. But these issues become second-nature to accept when you're on your fifth successive survivor cause the others die, and that's actually quite the problem. You'll find that your survivors die even more because, while you can achieve better-equipped survivors, these badasses must be new. Older ones can't be re-equipped, so whatever weapon you find them with is whatever they're permanently stuck with. It feels kind of bad to have to drive two knife-wielding innocents into a mob of zombies so they'll die and open up space for someone with a better gun.They also tend to get themselves killed because they must stand still to talk. While reading the nice snippets of conversation they have to offer can be nice, them stopping abruptly leaves them a sitting duck for hungry mouths and they aren't exactly sensitive about when they choose to speak. So just let your first couple die off till you can find ones with big shinies.
And these problems of overlooked design don't stop there. When you swap over an episode, you'll lose all your buildings, profits and other stats except your inventory and skills from the last episode. So really, there's no point in doing a bunch of buildings until you're on the last episode. And finally, beware this; When you do the absolute final mission, you can't go back into the game. Your screen will forever be stuck in a black limbo until you restart a new character. So once you've had one run-through, you should make your way through the game up until the last mission, then do all your free-roaming building-stealing fun.
So, fun! I've spent too long not talking about the gameplay so here goes. Survival Crisis Z is presented as a shooter from an isometric angle. I'd recommend goofing with the options until you can get a WASD and Mouse combination working, because the game becomes too hectic to play otherwise. Hectic it is, and it is oh so satisfying. You'll start out with basically one type of enemy, and that's z
ombies. You'll fight either old, decayed slow zombies, or the fresh ones. The ones that have recently been turned. These ones are fast, and vicious because they haven't had time to decay. As you move on you'll begin encountering more paranormal enemies... and places. One of my favourites being the "children". These are crazy little buggers that you can't see. Until they're really close to you, then they appear, and your entire world transforms into an insane asylum until you move away from the ankle-biters, or kill them. So if you're surrounded by a good mob of them you're likely to start feeling a little uncomfortable because you'll be running away, panicking and the world will constantly be changing around you. These are a very unique, fun enemy and the game is full of these.The game also tends to do paranormal things around you. For example, you'll be exploring an empty room, exit it, then come back inside immediately and you'll find the room flooded with a mob of crazy zombies that want to eat your flesh. Or you'll be exiting a safehouse - all of which are normally devoid of undead life - and suddenly a huge swarm of flesh hungry monsters comes bursting out of the door you just left and into the streets when they had nowhere to come from in the first place. It seems like an accidental loophole in game design, but it's honestly a good one and it keeps you on your toes.
So to fight these threats, you'll have many, MANY things at your disposal. From a handgun, revolver, shotgun, all the way to a military-grade heavy machine gun, or the ever-so-deadly flamethrower. These are easy to access in your inventory, because when you pull up your inventory it pauses your game. Here you have multiple sections to your HUD, three of which are interactive. Up top is your items. These consist of smokes, bombs, health, small food items, and even things you can mix and combine to create useful items or dangerous drugs. In the middle is your weapon and health wheel. You'll cycle through your weapons with directional buttons, and the red circle surrounding them represents your health. Try not to let this go down. On this screen you can also see how much ammo you have for each gun. Third, we have the skills section. Here you can view and use your skills that you have bought from safehouse leaders. Some of these are passive, while instant-use ones will show you what items you require to use them. These range from running fast, all the way to sentry turrets, and making C4 that can literally blow up an entire building.
Finally, we have the other miscellaneous stuff, like fatigue, hunger and your commodities. If your fatigue and hunger become far too low, you'll notice your character become slow, and your screen will begin twitching as a sign of unfocus. While it takes a long time to die of hunger, being brought down to a snails pace is deadly in itself, so you must sleep and eat to keep these going. This brings me to commodities. These consist of things like Food, Electronics, and a couple other things I forgot. Food is used automatically once your hunger hits zero to prevent it going negative, so always keep a healthy stock of food. The other commodities are used to make items, or initiate skills. One skill allows you to craft items out of commodities, while another lets you randomly disassemble your inventory into usable coms. The game is well thought out, and all in all it's presented simply, and usable. But, not user-friendly as it can take a while to figure out how the whole experience works.
Aesthetically wise, the game boasts a good, believable and properly disturbing audio track, all the way from the screeching white noise of the world changing around you, to the good loud bang of a gun (and it certainly is a bang) and of course the shuffling of good ol' zombies. But graphically... well, it's not gonna break the game. Some of the textures are good and pleasing, but sprites and such are cartoonish, and honestly downright ugly at times; And this is all spread out over a very repetitive world where buildings are not memorable, and you'll be checking your map constantly. Still, even if the graphics are bad, the game does show some creativity with it's artistic direction. The console menu is always in an LED-style red print with static overtop of it, and it's charming despite the actual graphic capability. These factors don't hurt the game for me, but if graphics are a big deal for you this is something you'll have to fight your way through to get at the sweet, delicious game candy.
Finally, the game boasts a rather unique system of dungeons. Occasionally you will come across a random grate in a room. This is a rare chance, and when you do come across it, you have to decide whether to enter it now, or never. When you leave the room, the grate will disappear so you can't go off and prepare yourself for the trials underneath. So, do you think you're ready? Cause if you are, and if you happen to survive the dungeons' dangerous halls, then you'll be heftily rewarded. From some real good amounts of items, to even very very special, secret items.
FINAL SAY:
Survival Crisis Z boasts almost perfection over the concept of a zombie apocalypse and even throws in some crazy paranormal twists in here and there. It had some design flaws and things that seem carelessly overlooked, but if you know what you're doing the game will love you and you'll love it back. So prepare yourself to face some seriously dangerous, paranormal and flesh-eating monsters as you fight your way through this apocalypse, not to mention the dangerous humans that may fire upon you depending on what you've done. So download it now right here! It's free!
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