Dead Season Review - Tactics Without Bite
I don’t care what anyone says or feels, I love zombies. Zombie movies, zombie games, the lot. I super dig them for two reasons: they’re human, so whenever someone gets bitten (or otherwise killed) there is a nice juicy dramatic tension there, and they’re constant. Usually, they’re a shambling wave of people turned dead, and there’s always a lot of people in the world. There is a certain survival aspect I really enjoy, and for me it never gets old.
That’s how I came across Dead Season. Near the start of the month, I trawl through Steam’s upcoming releases (its own horror story) and pick out a smorgasbord of tasty titles for me to enjoy. October is especially mouth-watering, as it’s Halloween. Dead Season is a turn-based tactical game, which to me actually is ripe for a lil zombie game to nudge into.
Four people, probably strangers, find themselves in a situation where they need to support each other and escape the oncoming zombie horde. We’ve all heard it a million times before, and that’s ok. No tea, no shade. The best part about zombies is that you don’t need to know how it all went down, just that it did.
After a quick tutorial, you’re thrust into your first mission. The goal is to escape. Each round, you have four action points to spend on movement, attack, reloading or fiddling with your inventory. Zombies are constantly spawning into the mission, which I quite liked and kept with the tone of the genre. You’re never meant to feel like you’re getting a leg up on a horde; you’re just barely getting by.
Noise is a huge part of the game also. Attacking with a non-silenced firearm causes sound, as do some environmental scripted events. When it fills up too much, more zombies spawn on the map. A secondary meter also fills up over time naturally, which also spawns more zombies.
Lots of strategic thinking goes into every turn. Each player can only carry four items, so you need to make smart decisions about who is searching what place for more goodies. Throwing to someone else (or trading, if you’re next to another player) takes those actions, and many missions require players to have a specific item to progress. You don’t want to waste time because, by the time any mission ends, there are usually a lot of zombies on the map. Many of them have a lot of health too, so sometimes it’ll be worth just outright fleeing past them where able. Zombies do have attacks of opportunity though, which leads back to taking time and thinking things through.
This part is where some of my bugbears raise their head. Accuracy is weird. Sure, the shiv you start with is going to have low accuracy, it’s a tiny weapon. But a baseball bat aimed at a shambler, only a 60% chance of hitting? A shotgun only hitting 80% of targets in a cone? Wasting turns trying to hit an enemy, with very low chances to hit with many weapons feels really bad. It doesn’t seem to take into consideration the player’s position either (outside of some perks), so there isn’t even strategic play like sneaking up behind a zombie for a guaranteed hit. Guns also jam like crazy, which would make more sense if this was a few years into a zombie apocalypse, but we’re led to believe this has only happened in the last few days. Did everyone store their guns in the fish tank or the cistern?
Of the game’s thirteen missions, you make story decisions in four of them, so there’s some replayability. I felt like I got my fill after playing through it once on hard though I do want to see if one of the players dies during a mission, does it affect things? A few times in a cutscene, one person gets saved by someone else on the team, but if they die, does that not happen? I didn’t have anyone die so I’m interested to find out.
Interestingly, items you collect on a mission might be used up between missions. I was actually ok with this, it meant you were constantly scavenging, and made it feel like they were struggling to get through the city, even when you weren’t in control. Some items can also be combined with others, like an oil filter and a gun to create a makeshift silencer, or putting a scope on a rifle to make a sniper rifle. Irritatingly, it didn’t seem to have a huge effect on the accuracy though, still only being about 80% accurate.
The missions have a decent variety too. Sometimes you’re escaping, sometimes you’re boarding up a building, and others you might be moving with stealth to try and avoid threats. The missions take about 20-30 minutes too, so I imagine a play length of about five to six hours.
All in all, I enjoyed Dead Season well enough. Low accuracy, especially on melee weapons or scope firearms feels bad and means that sometimes RNG can just be your worst enemy. There were times that all my party missed hitting a zombie they had surrounded, and there’s legitimately no worse feeling than wasting time due to RNG. Still, it’s not a bad little game. From the comments, it seems like the publisher is looking at community feedback so that’s great. I feel a bit like the developer wanted to make a hardcore strategic game but also wanted to make sure it was easy for people to get into, which leaves mechanics a bit on the fence.
Dead Season was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
