The Fallout series has taught us that once the world has been decimated by atomic bombs, the world will be occupied by shanty towns and cities made out of car doors, each one run by a weirdo or quirky character. In Endzone: A World Apart, you get to establish those shanty towns and car door cities, but you’re the quirky weirdo in charge.
Strong Foundations
Every game in Endzone: A World Apart begins with the basics, food and water. Your settlement won’t automatically have water supplied to it, so you need to set up jetties to collect the water from, and cisterns to store it in. Food too needs to be organised, coming from small fields of crops or orchards to start with.
Unlike other similar strategy games, settlers are organised into jobs. The only system that even comes close is that of Rimworld. The more settlers that are assigned to a job, the faster that job will be accomplished. Initially you’ll need builders, water carriers, and farmers. With these three jobs sorted you can quickly create a strong foundation for the town that will come later.
The game ramps up very quickly, requiring cabins for your settlers to live in. With a home, these settlers start to reproduce, and suddenly you need more food and water. Thankfully the game has a diverse range of buildings for gathering resources that make your settlement feel more realistic.
You could set up more farms and cisterns, but you’re encouraged to explore the alternatives. Hunting lodges keep deer from eating your crops, and provide a new source of food. Wells generate water over time, but you could also upgrade the cistern to have a rainwater collector to boost your already established infrastructure.
Bigger and Better
It doesn’t feel fast, but your town gets busy very quickly. Soon you’ll have settlers heading out to scavenge scrap so that you can produce base materials for new buildings and protective gear. As things develop, you can succeed or fail based on the efficiency of your infrastructure.
Endzone: A World Apart is a cruel game. It rewards you for paying attention to the needs of your people, but if you forget even one, it could all come crumbling down. The aforementioned population increase could cripple your food and water supply if you don’t increase the supply with new wells or farms.
There are many examples of where you can fall down in the game, but those where you beat the odds and win are all the same, infrastructure management. Every building has a green section that indicates a path. Using these paths and connecting buildings together makes an easy route for settlers.
Placing buildings too far apart, and ignoring these green paths, will cripple the speed at which settlers do anything.
Juggling Jobs
Unfortunately you can’t just sit back and keep your settlement small, you need to grow. In order to achieve that growth you’ll be expanding both the output and production of your people. For example, protective clothing can quickly become a problem if you’re not producing enough of it.
Generating that clothing isn’t as simple as constructing a building and assigning a job though. The clothing requires cloth, which you need to create from gathered scrap that has been refined. You’ll also need charcoal, which is a product that comes from burning wood that foresters gather.
To sum it up, you need an additional Forester, Coal Burner, and Refiner just to support your Tailor, all to create protective clothing. That clothing is then being used by people to collect more scrap to refine into cloth. Ironically, your settlers will probably be using more protective clothing in the process of gathering all of the resources, though the game thankfully isn’t actually that imbalanced.
Watch The Weather
Unlike some other survival strategy games, Endzone: A World Apart pits you against the elements too. The weather feels almost antagonistic. Every few seasons there will be a dry season. This forces you to harvest as much food and water as possible, because there will be none during the drought.
In these seasons there can also be sandstorms, which rip through the world and block your view of the settlement for a few seconds. Once it emerges from the dust, you’ll be able to assess the damage, and set those food and water gatherers to work repairing it.
The game doesn’t throw these events at you too often though, because they’re devastating. It keeps you on your toes, wondering if the next dry season will be your last. While it can be incredibly frustrating to lose a game due to poor water stockpiles leading up to a drought, that’s part of the realism.
The weather goes beyond what you know of in the world as it is though. Radiation is present everywhere, stronger in some areas, and weaker in others. At times, radiation can drift through your town, settling over it like an invisible sickness. This will slowly start to make survivors weak, killing them if you have no medical facilities.
Once again, this is a devastating event when it occurs, but it never hits the point when it feels unfair. Both droughts and radiation patterns are part of surviving in this post-apocalyptic world, and coming out on top after each one only strengthens your resolve.
Vague and Specific
While there is a tutorial in Endzone: A World Apart, it doesn’t walk you through everything you need to know. I failed many times with many towns, but each one taught me something new. First it was that you need to grow according to your size.
If you build too much before you have the settlers to assign to the jobs you’re creating, your infrastructure won’t survive. I also learned the hard way that you need to keep an eye on your cemetary. Currently the game doesn’t tell you when it’s full, which will lead to your town filling up with dead bodies instead of living ones, killing everyone off.
This might sound challenging, and it is, but it also adds to the overall feel of Endzone: A World Apart. The game’s world is desperate and difficult to live in, which is exactly what it must feel like to exist as one of your own settlers.
Exploring The New World
The latest update to Endzone: A World Apart adds in Expeditions. Using a new building, you can organise expeditions to structures dotted around the world. You’ll send settlers off to these locations in the hopes of finding some interesting or useful items for your town.
Once the explorers have reached their destination, you’ll be given a chance to assess where they should look for items. This can lead to a triumph for your people, discovering something that dramatically changes the future for your town, but could also end in nothing more than a few scraps of cloth.
The game is being updated every month with something new. It was Expeditions for April, but in May the developers are adding Scenarios. These will likely be small stories that you can work through with your town, helping out fellow survivors, or maybe just paying off a threatening band of roaming bandits.
While there’s no end in sight just yet for the game’s early access, I’d argue that now is a better time to get involved. Endzone: A World Apart does feel a little rough around the edges, but the improvements made each month are staggering. It feels like the game gets a new DLC with every update, making even the most exhaustive of sessions feel fresh the next time you jump in.
Verdict so Far
Endzone: A World Apart feels familiar because of the end of the world setting it presents you with. While it might just be the warmth of the radiation making it feel cozy, the city-building and management elements fit right at home.
The game is a challenge for players of any skill level, the tutorial is difficult enough. It has a plethora of options for customising new games, such as how many survivors you start with, how close you are to water, and how hectic the weather is.
There’s enough of a game here already to keep you busy for the rest of the year, and it’s just getting started. As more elements are added to it I have no doubt that it will come to rival similar games such as Frostpunk, and even Rimworld.
At this time it might feel bleak to be playing a game in which the world as we know it has ended, but it’s oddly hopeful. Seeing people strive to survive, and succeed, is possibly even more rewarding when it feels like we’re trying to do it ourselves, even if our plight is far less immense.