Endzone A World Apart (p)Review

Banished meets Fallout in the end zone

Endzone A World apart is currently being developed in Wiesbaden, Germany by Gently Mad. This is a strategy game or a so called City-Builder, although this is a mixture of this genre with a pinch of survival.

German Version:

This article is available here as text and as YouTube video. The video has a German voice-over and subtitles in many different languages. This means you can choose how you like to enjoy it most.

Video:

History

In the future of the year 2171 humanity is almost extinct and the earth is a contaminated, dirty heap of rubbish. 150 years earlier, in 2021, terrorists around the world blew up several nuclear power plants. And so it came about that in the ensuing chaos mankind almost died out completely. Only a few survived in bunkers and some now dare to take a first look out of the bunker door.

These settlers are trying to regain a foothold on the surface and are working to reclaim a small patch of land. But radiation rains, droughts and sandstorms make it very difficult for them to survive, and food, protective clothing and reasonable tools are in absolute short supply. This is the world of Endzone – A World Apart.

Game background

Hi there, welcome to the closed beta preview of Endzone – A World Apart. A new build-up strategy game from Gently Mad and Assemble Entertainment, which will be released early this spring and is currently still in a closed beta test.

I was kindly invited to this event and may now give you first insights into this new game. This will not be a complete review, because the game is actually far from being finished yet. But I hope I can show you the most important points of the game, so that you can decide for yourself at the early access release, if the game could be interesting for you or not.

You can already pre-order the game via the publisher’s website, pre-orderers will also get beta access to the version shown here. The link to it can be found at the bottom of this page. But maybe check the article first, if you like the game at all, and if the current version is already right for you.

Everything I’m showing or saying in this article about the game refers to an early beta version, which is not even in early access yet. A lot of game features are not yet finished, the balancing is not finished and the developers have some more features on their list to be added in the next months.

Endzone A World Apart – Game Type

Endzone A World Apart is a survival build-up strategy game. This means we begin with a small starting group of settlers who have stored very little supplies in their small scrap metal bus, after climbing out of their nuclear bunker only recently.

At the moment all of them are still healthy and free from radiation when they crawled out of the bunker. But we urgently need to provide food, clothing, shelter and find a solution for many other needs.

Endzone is a very complex game. If you know Banished, you will discover many parallels here. If you take a closer look, it becomes clear that Banished was the great role model here and many mechanics from this game are also used here. The game is not just a pure copy with a different setting, definitely not. It also has many own ideas and other approaches in numerous points.

Endzone currently offers more than 30 buildings and 21 different professions. And besides pure resource management, every citizen has some needs that need to be met. Otherwise he gets in a bad mood, or gets sick, starves to death, dies of thirst, radiation or who knows what else negative things can happen to him.

Endzone – Build up strategy

We start a settlement with the simple things. We need food and water very badly first. Here we should start as close as possible to a lake so that we can collect water and get fish to fish. There are of course other solutions for these problems, like wells and water catchers for water or berry pickers, fields and plantations for food. But especially at the beginning a lake is a great source of life.

Once we have put our initial resources into the buildings for the basic needs of our settlers, we also need new building materials quickly. So we should erect buildings for a lumberjack and a scrap collector to provide us with the important basic resources of wood and scrap metal. From this we can then build the first houses. And if someone really has nothing to do during all this work, he can start laying stone paths or digging up contaminated soil so that the people who work there are less affected.

Later on we can also disassemble our scrap metal into many other materials, such as fabric, electronics, metal and plastic. And from these we can then build tools, protective clothing against radiation and numerous more complex buildings. And with all this, we not only have to balance the people, the buildings and the resources, but most importantly, we have to pay attention to walking routes and timing. Because if things are too far apart, or we build the right things at the wrong time, it can easily bring down the delicate house of cards and lead the settlement to ruin.

End zone does not save with complex mechanics. But this is both a curse and a blessing. The balancing of all these complex mechanics, some of which are deeply interlocked, is still very much in its raw state in the current beta, but more about that later.

Resource system and management

Food and water are always scarce, wood and scrap metal have to be collected and many different other materials can be made from these things. In total, the basic interface already provides an overview of 12 different resources that we have to juggle.

But in the end there are many more, because food, for example, comes in many varieties, such as fish, meat, berries, roots. There are 7 kinds of vegetable fields as well as hemp as an amusement resource and via plantations another 7 kinds of fruit. Clothes are available in 3 quality levels, tools in two different designs, water can be irradiated in different degrees and probably there are some things I have not listed yet.

It is not enough to own these goods, they are tied directly to a location in warehouses, markets or the manufacturing plants. Therefore it is not enough to have a lot of water when the thirsty woodcutter is just at the far end of the settlement. If the way to the next water supply is too far, he will still die of thirst, although we may have stored thousands of units of water. He’ll have to walk to one of the camps first, and if the way there is too long, it means the end of this lumberjack’s life.

So we have to ensure not only the quantities, but also the most uniform availability possible everywhere in the settlement. The latter is to be ensured by means of various warehouses and marketplaces, but to bring all this into balance is a real challenge.

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Pre-order Endzone on the official game website:
https://endzone-game.com/

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https://de.gamesplanet.com/game/endzone-a-world-apart-steam-key–4322-1?ref=zapzockt
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Needs

Our settlers have an enormous need for water and food. One could think that they secretly export something to other settlements, that’s how much they consume. Starvation and dehydration are therefore the most common causes of death.

Furthermore, every settler needs a tool to work effectively. You can work without, but then everything goes much slower. Our bustling inhabitants need protective clothing so that they are not exposed to too much radiation, as this not only threatens their health, but may also render them infertile.

This would not only endanger our supply of offspring, but also have a strong negative influence on the mood of this settler. Because apart from basic needs, every settler has 13 different needs that he would like to have fulfilled. Here it starts with a house, food and water. His children, for example, make him happy or if his house even gets electricity.

But visiting a bonfire or a pub is also on his wish list for happiness, and he would like to have less radiation or dead relatives lying on the street without a funeral.

Survival – Shortage management and risks

The wasteland after the nuclear disaster offers a very rough and dangerous basis for life. And the necessary resources are hard to get from the land. Providing enough drinkable water and reasonably healthy food for all inhabitants already requires a large part of our existing labour force. Only when we have ensured this can we start to take care of other things.

The game is divided into seasons. All of them are equally warm, but at least there are no winters so far. But in every so-called season it rains sometimes more and sometimes less, and sometimes a drought comes over the country. Then the lakes dry up, all fields and berry bushes die. And then we should rather have a larger supply of water and food, otherwise our settlement will die faster than we can spell the word thirst.

Sandstorms and diseases are also making life and survival difficult for our settlers. Depending on rainfall and location, every piece of land is also more or less contaminated. And there is almost never enough of everything. Managing these shortages and dealing with them is a major challenge of the game.

And when food and water are regulated, the many other needs and problems come up. Somehow our settlement always has a little bit too little of something, usually several things at once. And so we have to constantly weigh up what to concentrate our workers on, constantly balance the distribution of the labour force and possibly build new buildings.

At the same time, however, we have to be careful that we do not get a population explosion. Because if we give our post-apocalyptic settlers a house and their needs are all fundamentally saturated for the time being, they quickly start to breed. And here we must also be very careful that we do not grow too fast. Because then the difficult balance of our settlement can easily tip over.

Endzone – state of the game

From a purely technical point of view, the game is already running very well. It doesn’t crash, and it doesn’t stutter on my several years old middle class system. There are almost no flickering textures. Placeholders, which are often found in betas or early access games, are almost impossible to find here. So in this respect the game is nearly finished.

The sound is neat, the graphics are not outstanding, but for a build-up strategy game somewhere between sufficient and good. The end time feeling is nicely implemented, if you zoom in on the landscape, you’ll find many small details in the surrounding ruins, which indicate previous settlements. And this is doubly nice, because we can then plunder these ruins and turn them into resources for our settlement.

The big construction site that this game currently has left is the balancing. And because the game is extremely complex, there’s probably a lot of work to be done. But the developers know that, and that’s why they’re releasing the game in stages. Endzone will be released first as a closed beta, then it will go into early access, and later, when hopefully everything is finished in a few months and has become a good and well-rounded game experience, it will move on to the final release Endzone.

So far the game has no campaign, no scenarios or anything like that. There is a random map generator and with it you can create different starting conditions. With some sliders you can make your life a little bit easier or harder, or let’s say in the current version between very difficult and almost impossible.

Opinion and conclusion

I really like the gameplay and the fallout-like setting appeals to me very much. I really liked the Banished role model. And its interesting mix of building strategy and balancing a complex economic system always made me want to start another round.

That’s exactly how I feel right now in End Zone. It’s fun to build a settlement in the hostile environment, and by carefully working out the many ways to find a route not to die out. Because that is the big threat and challenge. At the beginning we have only a few settlers and they don’t live endlessly. So they need a place to reproduce and provide for offspring, so that there can be further generations of wasteland settlers.

Endzone does not tell any story so far, you start your settlement and then everything is pure fight for survival. And that fight is really hard. Because the balancing in the current closed beta version is still far from finished and everything can get confused if you’re not careful.

Or actually, that’s the wrong word. At the moment it’s more like trying to keep everything in balance for as long as possible before everything gets out of control and collapses. In my 5 settlements so far there was always a point where even the previously completely stable settlements suddenly tipped over and everything collapsed within a season and then very quickly all died out.

This makes Endzone with the current state of play still an absolute challenge. It feels like balancing a chair upside down on your nose, with a knife on the corner of one chair leg and a full coffee cup on the tip of the knife, and then running around town with it. It is not a question of whether you will spill the coffee, only when.

But I am very confident that this will get better. It is not without reason that the developers are taking this complex path with beta and early access. The intention behind this pre-beta is to get the game as finished as possible with dedicated players until the early access launch. So that the hairiest problems will have been solved by the time the wider community of players can give their opinion. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the very committed teams of Gently Mad and Assemble Entertainment and will continue to follow the development.

I am looking forward to your opinion about this game in the comments. IF you watched the vieo, the storm on thumb and subscription button is released. More gaming news, reviews and all the other stuff you can find here on my website ZapZockt.de . Then I wish you another great day, have a good time, ciao ciao, your Zap.

Links and Sources:

Pre-order Endzone on the official game website:
https://endzone-game.com/

Game Steam Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/933820/Endzone__A_World_Apart

Publisher Twitter:
https://twitter.com/assembleteam

Dev Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/gentlymadstudios/

Publisher Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/AssembleTeam/