Developer: Northway Games
Publisher: Northway Games
RRP: £10.99 (Steam and Humblebundle) £11.39 (Gog.com)
Released: 29th May 2015
Available on: Steam, Humblebundle and Gog.com
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
Approximate game length: 12+ Hours
All across the world life has become a daily struggle, hordes of undead roam the streets making just getting basic supplies to live more than a little difficult. But somehow you and a small group of survivors have not only managed to survive in this horrifying new world but have even managed to carve out a small chunk of it of your own. Question is, how long can you hold off the dead?
Rebuild 3: The Gangs of Deadsville (which will henceforth be known as just Rebuild 3) is a combination of a city builder, survival manager and 4X strategy game. Ordinarily I would think that any game attempting such a thing was over reaching but in this case Rebuild 3 succeeds. Not bad for a game that was developed with the mobile market in mind. Thankfully despite its mobile roots there isn’t a micro-transaction to be found anywhere and the controls have been translated to work with a keyboard and mouse.
When you start the story campaign (or quick play) you are required to create your survivor. Much of what you can do is merely cosmetic, however there is a section that can make a big difference to your game. This section is about what job you performed before the zombies appeared in the world. Depending on what profession you chose you’ll be given certain benefits and equipment. In a move that I find slightly annoying it seems that you can’t enter the quick play without first at least attempting the story campaign.
Any survivor that you get will start with one skill which is levelled up but performing the actions related to the skill; farming and scavenging for scavengers, researching and crafting for engineers etc. Eventually your survivors can develop a second skill, although this can take quite some time.
It’s easy to look at this game and think that it’s turn based, but you’d be wrong there. Its actually a real time city builder that it happens you can pause the time on. Once you un-pause the game world you can set the time to move in increments of fifteen, thirty and forty five minute increments as well as an hour. As the time passes you will find that occasionally an event appears forcing you to make a choice. From what I can tell whether these choices will end well for you or not is a matter of chance really.
Despite what its rather cartoony art style portrays this game has some quite in depth mechanics. Everything from keeping track of your resources, to managing your survivors relationships through to diplomatic relations with other survival clans. And that’s without even mentioning the Zombies, who I found more of a nuisance than a threat, that is until the really big hordes appear, that’s when you really start to actually pay attention to them.
On the whole… yeah, this a game I can really get behind. I’ve had quite a lot of fun with it and I’m even debating about getting it on my tablet since it seems ideal for when I need to kill a little time.
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