David Gillon

 I've had 'Surviving the Aftermath' from Paradox Games on my computer games wishlist for a while, mostly because a semi-strategic survival game seemed like it would scratch a lot of my computer game wants, more than for having heard great things about it. Turns out it's this week's free game (until the 23rd) on Epic - that's definitely my kind of price*.

It also turns out it scratches my recent itch for a town-builder - I've been watching people play Cities: Skylines 2 on youtube. The setting for Surviving the Aftermath is 20 years after everything went to hell, there are plagues, radiation, mutated animals, and meteors keep falling from the skies, and you need to establish a small settlement for survivors.

You start out with a couple or so specialists (number varies depending on the multiple difficulty settings) on a map with an access-chokepoint to give you a secure location - there may be multiple maps, but I've only played one so far, with a road between a cliff and a lake opening into a big bowl full of trees and ruins. You have a few supplies, probably enough to put up a building or two before calling in your survivor group, but I just called them straight in and the game didn't punish me for that. You can then use your people (divided into adults, elders and children) to put up buildings, which roughly split into accomodation, storage, resource gathering, and medical/survival. So you throw up a few tents and start looting the woods and fishing the river. Food seems like the main early game issue, and you have the dichotomy between needing more people to man buildings and carry stuff between them (it's a bit like Surviving Mars in transport capacity between building nodes being important - I'm not sure they don't share some code), and those same people representing more mouths to feed. There's also a tech-tree, so you can progress from basic technologies to more advanced ones - tents to shanties to shanties with interior walls (so your birth rate doesn't drop <g>), or fishing pier to fishing hut (so you can keep fishing when the lake freezes over) to fishing hut with a bigger pier for an extra fisherman.

Once you've built the gate and wall to keep your people safe you can send your specialists out onto the world map, which is less detailed and split into regions, each with about three potential supply nodes to loot. But it can take multiple days to get there and back, especially as you move into other regions, and those specialists are also your first line of defence for your colony against threats such as bandits or dangerous animals, so again you want more of them, but they arrive with their own survivor groups, so more mouths to feed. As you push out further from the colony you can build outposts so they don't have to trek all the way back to the colony after each mission, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

And as time goes by you'll be hit by various catastrophes - pandemics, winter storms, fallout and meteor strikes are the ones I've found so far - meteor strikes during a pandemic struck me as a little bit over the top, but I survived.

If it's got a fault, it's that it can be a little slow in periods when you're trying to accumulate the resources for the next step forward, but that's relatively common in resource management games, and seeing as I got it for free I can't complain too loudly! 

* I'm not 100% sure if that's free for all time, or free-to-play for the week, but seeing as it doesn't say free-to-play anywhere I'm leaning towards the first of those. I'm also not clear on the DLC situation, the game seems to say I have them, but there's no sign of them in game that I've noticed and they're on sale at a reduced price on Epic, so maybe I'm reading that DLC screen wrong. I'm happy enough with just the main game for the price.

So last night I settled down to play the first tier five Point of Interest (POI) I've run up against in zombie game Seven Days to Die. Bear in mind my character is now pretty much maxed out on skills, completely maxed out on hit points, with mostly max level weapons and armour.

The POI  was a large factory site which I had to enter, kill all the zombies, and retrieve a hidden courier satchel. I went in with 4 weapons (drum-fed auto shotgun, pistol, assault rifle and silenced sniper rifle) and 750 rounds of ammunition*. Most zombie encounters up to now have been running 1-4 zombies, with maybe 6 to 8 for the boss fight before getting to the main loot. I realized previous rules might not apply when my first encounter threw 8 zombies at me. And they kept on coming.

I'd figured it might take a couple of hours (two in-game days), four hours later I threw myself despairingly off a rooftop, because after what I thought was the boss fight I was swarmed again, trapped in a corner by multiple high-level zombies, and that was the only option that had any chance of not leaving me dead in seconds. It was pure chance there was a lower level roof for me to land on and leg it back to my jeep on 53 hit points out of 200.

By my reckoning I fired about 550 of 300 rounds of pistol ammo (that's not a typo, I managed to find extra just as I was about to run out), 130 rounds from the shotgun, the same from the sniper rifle and about 100 from the assault rifle (I'd held it back for the boss fight). I may well have killed over 200 zombies, it was certainly well past 100. And the factory still beat me.

I can't help feeling that possibly the balance may need tweaking.

* You could totally call this armed for bear as there was a zombie bear in the car park outside.