A city-building/survival/logistics game, Endzone: A World Apart, is set in the grim future following a nuclear winter, which tainted the surface of the planet and blotted out the sun for more than a century. Humanity survived, however, and is starting to reclaim the surface. That’s where you come in.
The basic challenge the game sets is whether or not you can build a settlement that will survive, or even thrive, in a distinctly hostile environment. The theme of nuclear contamination pervades and drives much of what players will be struggling to manage. Settlers will need protective clothing (different types for different levels of contamination), water may need filtering, food decontaminating. Rain may bring water which is either pure and life giving, or highly contaminated – messing with your ability to supply decent food and even clean water. On top of this you have dry patches where everything but your underground water supplies will disappear (in turn leading to crop failures if you haven’t set up an irrigation system), and sandstorms which will wreak havoc with your buildings, chewing up precious resources in order to repair them. And that’s not to mention marauders who will quite happily levy a toll upon your settlement, and attack if said loot is not forthcoming (unless you’ve built up sufficient defenses).
In contending with this, players will be largely choosing the location of buildings, roads, and the management of settlers, assigning them to whatever tasks are deemed most vital. Player control extends even down to the settlers’ reproduction rates (by providing family friendly dwellings). Get this wrong and you’ll either have too few healthy workers to keep your settlement running, or way too many mouths to keep fed and watered. It’s tough, demanding, but pretty satisfying when you start to turn your situation around. Even more so when you manage to make your settlers happy (which in turn leads to a healthier, longer lived, and more energetic population).
It’s not easy, but the game knows this. Should an important resource like protective gear or tools start to run low (which is all to easy to do), a usually easy-to-satisfy request from the citizens pops up. Should you complete this, you will be given a small cache of the resource in question, hopefully letting you get over that particular speed-bump and carry on.
If this all sounds a bit daunting, it is possible to switch the game over to either ‘easy’ or ‘build’ mode, which minimizes threats (and for the latter, unlocks all building types), and lets you concentrate on building and optimizing the best settlement possible. Of course, for those looking for a challenge, it is possible to up the difficulty, or play through different scenarios, ranging from an exploration race, to surviving increasingly severe droughts or marauder raids.
Visually, the game looks great. From cobbled-together shanty town style buildings, to the rain which regularly sweeps the landscape. There’s something slightly mesmerizing about cranking up the speed and watching your settlement grow through a sort of time-lapse, as your settlers scurry about building, making and moving resources. Sound has likewise been carefully done. In fact, the only thing I noted was that some of the functions, like covering crops and rain-catchers when contaminated ran comes along, are not necessarily where you’d expect them to be (hint: they’re controlled via the weather station, not directly at the fields or rain-catchers).
While how much you like it may depend on how much you enjoy the particular setting, all up Endzone: A World Apart is a very competent and solid game, equal parts fun, satisfying and challenging. If you like city-building games with a stiff survival challenge built in, then it will doubtless appeal. ■