About Project Insanity:
Reviewing this game feels like a daunting task. There’s so much I want to say, that I could write pages and pages on this game. Let’s just start with this: Zombies are popular enemies in games, because they enable lazy developers. You don’t need a story, but if you want one you can just rip off any established zombie lore. Your AI can be barebones with zombies that just path to the nearest player and attack once they get into melee. The lack of sophistication isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and so what if the path-finding is easily exploited and there’s no strategy at all. They’re zombies. They’re supposed to be stupid. Then you just give the player a gun, send wave after wave of zombies at the player and throw your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game up on Steam and hope someone buys it for $2.50 because they want trading cards. This is not one of those games. This is a game that puts monumental amounts of effort into every tiny aspect of the game. It is the most immersive zombie game I’ve ever played, and the fact that it accomplishes that in an isometric 3rd person perspective is nothing short of amazing. The way it limits your view to the direction your character is looking is done incredibly well, and it even plays with that system a bit, adjusting the viewing angle depending on your character’s traits, health, and the visual conditions. Each zombie has randomized stats in terms of how perceptive they are, how long they remember the player after you leave their line of sight, and how fast they move. Some zombies are smart enough to path around obstacles and some will bang on the closed side of a double door even if the other door is open. This creates opportunities for the player to split up zombies by abusing these differences. If there’s a pack of 6 zombies you can slowly creep to them until a few notice you, then retreat and dispatch just those. Or if you have a big horde on you, you can run them through a building so some of them get stuck on windows and furniture, giving you spacing to take them out in smaller groups. All of this leads to a combat system that isn’t based around twitch aiming or muscle memory, but rather a decision making based combat system. Where, when and how you fight matters a lot more than which weapon you have or what your character’s stats are. An obese weakling can kill 100s of zombies under the right circumstances and a god-like character with max stats can die to a single zombie sneaking up behind them. It’s things like this that really give the game the most authentic zombie experience I’ve played. Wading into zombies to try to kill them will just result in you joining them instead. Using a combination of stealth, distraction, and discretion is the best way to survive. Adding to the immersion is how in depth each of the games systems are. Everything from constructing a wall to making a potato salad lands in the sweet zone of being complex enough to be interesting but not so complex as to be overwhelming. But the really amazing thing about PZ is how layered the experience is. At first, you’re just going house to house, killing zombies and raiding pantries for food. Eventually you master the combat system and positioning. You’ll live long enough for your character to experience exhaustion and fatigue and eventually you’ll learn to master those systems, too. You’ll move onto base building and die to the helicopter the first time it happens. Then you live long enough for water and power to fail. Then you get to the point where all the easy places to loot are looted and you have to decide to try riskier places, or perhaps work on making your own food via farming, foraging, or trapping. Survive that long, and the season will begin to change and with it, new problems. Long term nutrition starts to matter, as even if you are satisfying your character’s hunger, they may be losing weight every day and in danger of wasting away. Then winter hits. Survive the winter and you can survive anything. Now the sandbox is open to you. Do you want to max every stat? Build the ultimate base? Master mechanics and build the ultimate zombie killing vehicle? Or perhaps take back your hometown from the undead, no matter how long it takes? It’s up to you. Just don’t get too cocky, because no matter what you’ve built and how many zombies you’ve killed, you are always 1 bite away from joining their ranks. And even then, there’s more. Try challenge runs with negative traits, or crank up zombie numbers and infection chances, or even enable sprinters, if you dare. Dive into steam workshop and download mods to change the game or add new content. There’s always another challenge to take on. At present, the beta 41 version of the game (the version you should be playing) only has remote couch co-op. This will eventually change, however, and when it does multiplayer will open up a whole new dimension. All in all, Project Zomboid is a superb game, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some flaws. The game is still very much in early access development. There are a few things about it and it’s systems that are a bit wonky as a result. A big criticism is how slow skills level, although in custom sandbox mode you can add an xp multiplier if you want to. Also some skills like carpentry are well fleshed out and feel vital, whereas electronics feels almost forgotten and there’s very little reason to advance in it. There aren’t any huge bugs I’ve encountered, but sometimes the interface can be a bit odd. There’s also a lack of polish sometimes, like for example there are no animations for sitting in a chair or sleeping in a bed. But all in all, the rest of the game is so fun, so satisfying that it’s easy to overlook these things, especially because this is a $15 game by an indy developer, not a $60 +micro-transactions AAA title.
