I love the desperate last stand. It is the adrenaline rush of desperation cranked all the way up to 11. The ultimate stakes have been raised and your life is laid down on the line with nowhere to run. Especially with zombies clawing at the doors to rip the skin off your face and devour your chest cavity. I loved the idea of Zombie City Defense 2, about simultaneously scavenging a city as a forgotten military squad while defending it from zombies. I just wish surviving wasn’t so hard.
Zombie City Defense 2 is a zombie defense game set in a city created by Mozg Labs. With the prior title developed for Android, it seems part of this being a sequel is progressing onto a PC device. You are one of the last military squads who walk across the land trying to scrape together something resembling a civilization. This scraped together society will chiefly involve making survivors into soldiers and defending resources from waves of zombies.
The campaign starts with naming your squad. For me, it was 21st Squad when I was being mature and Rooty Tooty Point-N-Shooty Lads every other time. You’re then launched onto a blue-tinged map screen and asked which map you want to try and at what difficulty. The campaign starts off with one mission and the tutorial. From there, you unlock more by gathering tokens gained by doing levels, with more gathered from harder difficulty completions.
Another unlockable on this menu is where the game begins to show its beautiful colours. Every time you complete an objective (side and main) upon finishing, you earn points that can be used to gain access to new equipment. These include new troops, new vehicles and new general upgrades.
While it seems you can just flood the field with upgraded troops, you’re actually limited on what you can bring to the field based on a point count. As well as this, often troops/upgrades/vehicles wouldn’t be a direct improvement but more situational. One example was a flamethrower unit allowing you to clean out buildings of zombies easier, but tends to be slow and not get defense bonuses from hiding in buildings. I also spotted one oddity involving a troop boasting greater damage in the description, but the statistics suggesting the polar opposite in comparison to the basic soldier.
In the end this research tree allows an interesting open progression beyond just banging your head against a wall until you hit the next map.
The main meat of the game seems to usually task you to defend an outpost for so many days, trying to keep your general alive as wave after wave of zombies come to beat down the doors to your hidey-hole. You then recruit soldiers, build turrets and erect defenses on buildings to hold the tide off. Meanwhile, you’ll be trying to gather resources from the abandoned buildings that litter the map you’ve been dumped inside. These resources are what will let you build, let you heal and let you recruit more.
The complexity of these missions is surprising. You may have weather modifiers that make some gear more effective than others, or even make zombies particularly trialling. You’ll be erecting different barricades or turrets or training particular troops, each one having noticeably different styles (e.g. scavenger being weak, but fast at movement and looting buildings). In the missions I tried, I had to change my tactics radically to suit the city I was facing and how weather affected things.
“So, in a game about a last stand against the swarming horde, how hard could it be?” is likely the top question on your list, especially considering some hints dotted up to this point. The answer is hard. Very hard. Hard like eating nails and washing it down with bleach.
I can understand some people wanting a challenge. I enjoy playing games on the hardest difficulty I can manage. Saying that, successfully completing two missions on the easiest difficulty (or harder) with four hours of banging my head isn’t a good sign. Especially as missions often take roughly 10 minutes each. In the end, I saw the inside of four missions. I honestly consider myself competent at RTS titles. Yet most missions left me grumbling about my now-kicked-in teeth.
I guess part of the problem is the lack of recovery. When things start going wrong, they go wrong hard and fast like falling out of a window. As soon as the tide turns, as soon as things begin to overwhelm you, that’s it. You’ll lose enough soldiers that you may as well just surrender your throats to the undead horde and try again. It was incredibly rare to find a cool moment of just pulling things back and getting on track. The best that could be hoped for, when people began to fall, was it to take long enough for the timer to run out.
Another part of the issue is the aesthetic. There is an interesting blue appearance that reminds me of Frozen Synapse, but with icons instead of white highlights. It starts off clear and easy to understand, while distinctive. When the zombies start coming thick, it more resembles a vague red cloud over buildings. It becomes so messy you just cross your fingers and hope for the best when things turn chaotic, rather than giving the orders you need to give.
There is one way to possibly leverage some success: grinding. As you do the same missions over and over again, you gather points that can unlock equipment to aid you in harder missions. The fortunate side to this is that the missions are often short enough to allow quick repetition.
However, considering you require at least a victory in a mission to get an amount worth writing home about, you are grinding away for a good while before getting gear that may turn the tide. If it doesn’t, well, back to the repetitive grinding stone. You could do side-missions to gather more points, but it is a risk that can lead to a loss. Considering you lose a significant amount of the point gain if you lose, it is rare for a side mission to be chased if a win is anything less than certain. Overall, this just feels like the overt padding you’d find in an RPG awkwardly applied to a strategy title.
The final score of Zombie City Defense 2 is a 5.5/10. It is a strategy game that will demand you to grind to climb over its monumental difficulty. Only after creating a slightly-bloody hole in the wall with your forehead you can start to see progress on the horizon.
Even with the variation, it is definitely a testing title saved from a worse mark by the low price point. If you need something small to sate your hunger for strategy, Zombie City Defense 2 is something succulent (if perhaps tough) to chew on. Just ignore the tribal tattoo on the skin, it’s probably especially exotic long-pork.
A PC Review Code for Zombie City Defense 2 was provided by Mozg Labs for the purpose of this review