Drought’s a-comin'
Sometimes you forget to build a graveyard.
You play a band of underground survivors repopulating the surface.
There are plenty of building types to plop down and plenty of workers to assign.
Little unseen fishermen will add to your food stash, little invisible weavers will increase your stack of fabrics.
Many buildings get bonuses for being near others of a certain throw in.
A coal furnace near a lumberjack’s shack, for example.
A storage depot near… uh, anything.
This, I think, is the game’s quiet appeal.
It’s about efficiency, sure, about clicking the knobs of a machine back and forth.
but it’s a machine that doesn’t want to accommodate you all the time.
It says: “Look, this is how things are in the deadlands, deal with it.”
There are moments of seasonal peril that require you to stockpile goods for difficult moments.
A drought causes lakes to completely vanish, and your water supplies to dwindle rapidly.
Toxic rain demands protective clothing, or radiation sickness will befall your frontiersfolk.
So there is some level of ongoing threat.
But aside from this tension I found the whole thing strangely relaxing.
A toylike truck offers Endzone 2’s side gig in scavengey adventuring.
You guide the truck along the cracked roads of the garbage future, looting various ruins for extra resources.
Find an axe and force open some doors.
Discover a book that will help you identify plants, thus unlocking new seeds to farm.
This is also how you advance up the game’s research tree.
Each small zone of green and habitable land that you discover will have distinct strengths and weaknesses.
Another will be in the swamp, well-suited for making medicinal herbs.
Another might boast a seam of iron to capitalise upon, or an iodine mine.
In time, a small internet of goods starts to form.
Interdependent chains of productions arise, and you might start to make a run at optimise things.
It’s a fairly standard base-building process of creating multiple towns with criss-crossing logistical needs.
Folks, do we reallyneeda graveyard?
When toxic storms strike, a little geiger meter shows how much radiation your settlers are getting exposed to.
If the sound of the geiger doesn’t unsettle you, the rickety voice acting might.
The music too feels very placeholder.
But against the bucolic backdrops and overgrown country houses it creates a strange clash of ambience.
I turned this music down to 0% and put on a “chill guitar” playlist instead.
It works a little better.
I have other misgivings.
For a game about efficiency and chains of production, there is sometimes unnecessary friction.
The long loading times when resuming your save file will hopefully shake out in early access.
As for other stuff, I don’t know.
Can’t one building do both?
There are other restrictive quirks.
But the research tree of Endzone 2 requires not only knowledge points, but also worldly goods.
It is, at times, a slow game, even on its fastest-forwardedest setting.
Even if that concern is always attached to a selfish desire to avoid resources plummeting.
“This will slow down vaccine production.”
Better get digging now, those bodies won’t bury themselves.
