A-Z backlog challenge: Dead Age
Dead age is one of quite a few zombie games released in the last few years which sees you gathering a group, improving a base/town and improving your teams equipment as you face greater challenges and attempt to survive or escape to safety.
There are various locations to explore. Each one has 20 zones with progressively harder enemies. There are a decent variety here, including zombies, wild animals, other unfriendly groups of survivors (referred to as punks) as well as soldiers.
Fights are fought out in turn based fashion much like in Final Fantasy 7 (as the developers mention in the steam page). You can attack with either melee or ranged weapon, use one of your combat skills or use an item from your inventory.
After each battle you get semi-random loot such as armor, ammo, food or medical supplies or a random event where you can choose how to act to potentially get rewards as well. Many of these have a chance to succeed based on which skills you have upgraded on your characters.
Skills are divided into combat and job skills. Combat skills help you in battle, such as a medic skill which gives you 10% health back, shotgun blast which hits all enemies or engineering skills such as grenades and traps. The skills seem to be fairly well balanced, although I didn't find the need to use the higher level medic skills which for example boost your strength. As you raise your skills, you also raise attributes linked to them. Improving your melee skill improves strength, ranged weapons improves ranged damage and medic improves constitution which affects hit points. As it costs less to raise lower level skills, there is a choice between becoming a bit of a jack of all trades or focusing on a few skills to get the highest level moves.
Jobs allow you to create items with the materials you find. The blacksmith makes ammo, doctor makes medkits, outfitter armo and the gunsmith weapons. Higher level job skills allow you to make higher quality gear from higher quality loot. Hunters supplement the rations you find while scavenging whilst guards keep your stash safe from zombies and punks.
The game also compares itself to FTL. I find this somewhat problematic. Runs in FTL are only a few hours. Each sector has something random happen from the off. Fighting the same enemy in every game in the same spot before then having the chance for a random event is quite different. Dead Age is also much, much longer. For this reason they had to focus more on balance. People would be really annoyed at dying after 20+ hours due to rng not giving them enough food or ammo or whatever. Dying after an hour or two in FTL because you didn't get any upgraded weapons is not a big issue as you can just restart. For this reason Dead Age is a lot less tense and a lot more grindy. There are some quests thrown in to make things more interesting. Some are random and others further the plot. Many add extra characters to join the group (you need a lot to do all the jobs mentioned above). Unfortunately these all take place in the same areas as the general scavenging. Doing a quest through the exact same 20 levels you've just been though the day before is not that great.
You never really feel in great danger on scavenging runs. You generally just quit when you get to the point where you are using more supplies (ammo and medical supplies) than you are finding after the fights. The fact that better loot is only generally only incrementally better (+1 damage +1 crit for example) than it's predecessors also makes finding items less exciting. Medikits and tools may well be what you are hoping for the most at times.
While progressing through the game you unlock medals for various achievements. If you die you can use these to unlock different starting characters as well as their starting skills and gear.
I think this an ok game which I enjoyed playing in small doses over a week or two. It's worth checking out on sale if you are a big fan of turn based battles and the zombie genre especially if it reaches -66% or -75% in the future.
Release year: 2016
Price: $14.99
Cheapest Sale price $8.99 (40% off)
Rating: 6.7
There are various locations to explore. Each one has 20 zones with progressively harder enemies. There are a decent variety here, including zombies, wild animals, other unfriendly groups of survivors (referred to as punks) as well as soldiers.
Fights are fought out in turn based fashion much like in Final Fantasy 7 (as the developers mention in the steam page). You can attack with either melee or ranged weapon, use one of your combat skills or use an item from your inventory.
After each battle you get semi-random loot such as armor, ammo, food or medical supplies or a random event where you can choose how to act to potentially get rewards as well. Many of these have a chance to succeed based on which skills you have upgraded on your characters.
Skills are divided into combat and job skills. Combat skills help you in battle, such as a medic skill which gives you 10% health back, shotgun blast which hits all enemies or engineering skills such as grenades and traps. The skills seem to be fairly well balanced, although I didn't find the need to use the higher level medic skills which for example boost your strength. As you raise your skills, you also raise attributes linked to them. Improving your melee skill improves strength, ranged weapons improves ranged damage and medic improves constitution which affects hit points. As it costs less to raise lower level skills, there is a choice between becoming a bit of a jack of all trades or focusing on a few skills to get the highest level moves.
Jobs allow you to create items with the materials you find. The blacksmith makes ammo, doctor makes medkits, outfitter armo and the gunsmith weapons. Higher level job skills allow you to make higher quality gear from higher quality loot. Hunters supplement the rations you find while scavenging whilst guards keep your stash safe from zombies and punks.
The game also compares itself to FTL. I find this somewhat problematic. Runs in FTL are only a few hours. Each sector has something random happen from the off. Fighting the same enemy in every game in the same spot before then having the chance for a random event is quite different. Dead Age is also much, much longer. For this reason they had to focus more on balance. People would be really annoyed at dying after 20+ hours due to rng not giving them enough food or ammo or whatever. Dying after an hour or two in FTL because you didn't get any upgraded weapons is not a big issue as you can just restart. For this reason Dead Age is a lot less tense and a lot more grindy. There are some quests thrown in to make things more interesting. Some are random and others further the plot. Many add extra characters to join the group (you need a lot to do all the jobs mentioned above). Unfortunately these all take place in the same areas as the general scavenging. Doing a quest through the exact same 20 levels you've just been though the day before is not that great.
You never really feel in great danger on scavenging runs. You generally just quit when you get to the point where you are using more supplies (ammo and medical supplies) than you are finding after the fights. The fact that better loot is only generally only incrementally better (+1 damage +1 crit for example) than it's predecessors also makes finding items less exciting. Medikits and tools may well be what you are hoping for the most at times.
While progressing through the game you unlock medals for various achievements. If you die you can use these to unlock different starting characters as well as their starting skills and gear.
I think this an ok game which I enjoyed playing in small doses over a week or two. It's worth checking out on sale if you are a big fan of turn based battles and the zombie genre especially if it reaches -66% or -75% in the future.
Release year: 2016
Price: $14.99
Cheapest Sale price $8.99 (40% off)
Rating: 6.7
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