Have you ever wondered what would you do, if there where zombies right in your neighbourhood? Would you maybe head to the closest supermarket you usually shop at, check out the old police station where your uncle used to work for some guns or even consider hitting up that pharmacy run by the grumpy lady that always gave you the creeps? Well, that’s pretty much the deal with Infection Free Zone. Tested on Linux Mint with Proton Experimental.
Infection Free Zone, developed by Jutsu Games and published by Games Operators, is a post-apocalyptic game set in the post-apocalyptic world flattened by the unforgiving “Mad Virus”. We land sunny survivors in a deserted cities and get to work setting up an “Infection-Free Zone”, restoring buildings, maximizing our defenses and collecting supplies. Our not so law abiding citizens are supposed to keep our base safe when animals get crazy every night, we can also get some research done and trade with others. Not all fellow survivors, however, are very friendly.
To sum up, a basic yet sophisticated plan: guide your posse, prepare the base to defend itself and fight off the waves of infected. Let me see if it differentiates the game from others in my playthrough of a game demo.
I am currently playing around with an interesting mix of city-building and survival strategy. It is called Infection Free Zone, and we are busy setting up our home base, repurposing buildings, and slapping down defenses. The whole repurposing thing is a significant departure from your traditional city builders. Instead of just plopping down your new entertainment avenue wherever you please, you have got to work with what you have got. It is a neat development, particularly when it comes to defending your base. There is a handful of buildings we can place wherever we like, mainly defense towers.
But it is not just the challenge that makes Infection Free Zone an appealing game. The use of real geographic data from OpenStreetMap is what makes this game one of a kind. Any city from around the world will be at your service in the full game when it is finally released. Furthermore, the developers claim they also added specific buildings and their intended uses from the OSM. So if you know where your grocery store is in your real world’s location, it will be in the game, too. I would have checked it out, but this feature was disabled for the demo made available to us. By the way, the main designer of the game made some interesting confessions in an interview we will attach here shortly. One notable event concerns OpenStreetMap. He said they had been using their version of the map, so editing the original source would not affect the game.
I first need to tell you a bit about the kind of game it is. Manor Lords falls under the RTS-ville category of games: RTS gameplay spiced up with city management elements. It has a city map featuring roads, quarries, windmills, farms, and signs in German in a Chinese city . I was pleased to learn just how detailed the game can get here. You can even start in Hanoi or my adopted hometown’s small German town. Not to brag, but you should see how much you can customize this map. But hey, that’s not the main thing.
I had a minor concern during my German version testing. I ran out of wood and saw draußen Holz , which probably means “out of wood”, but the localization still needs improvement. There are no other significant mistranslations that I have noticed; I am sure the developers are constantly working on it. I do not think there should be too many problems if you play in English either. After all, Manor Lords not supposed to be an educational game.
Rather than this, the game is a fun one, and I have a lot to say about it. It added so much extra fun because it was really tough. Well, at first, it seems like your typical strategy. We’ve got a base, workers, and soldiers, but we can’t control our workers directly. We just give them an order and they perform, but more often, they chill somewhere instead of going after the resources they need. For example, I had no three wooden stables because I was short of wood. But my workers just stand still waiting for him to be brought up. And what needed to be done in this case was to move them somewhere which I did , but in such a game, it would be better if it happened automatically.
Day and night cycle in FNZ is super important. During the day, our workers work, at night they hide in the headquarters and specially converted safe houses. Squads of four people are no different – these little teams are utilized to scavenge supplies during the day and fight for us. Each of these people have their own separate weapon and they also have a shared ammo pool. When that pool’s empty, the squad resorts to melee weapons. I really liked that things seemed to move along fairly quickly, especially when it came to the night.
Safety house is the way to go during the night because it gets really dangerous after that. Zombie hordes appear near our base and even directly target it. The first night was relatively quiet for me, but second night saw a huge wave of horde coming towards my location. My first playthrough was very harsh and I eventually perished as I ran out of ammo, leaving my base completely defenseless. However, even if one gets in such situation and squads start fighting off the zombies with melee weapons, you just won’t have enough time to kill them all.
Though the game takes on some heavy battles, other activities make it a touch more realistic. The most crucial lies in the world’s need for a car. You can use it to collect your resources, commute a touch faster and run over your enemies. When you send your squad to a house in your car, they hop out and start picking stuff up and storing it in the car. The same cool thing happens when they come back and all is smooth and with minimum clicking. But your car can run out of fuel and break, so keep an eye on that. Since it can make the difference between your survival and you being wiped out, having a car will come in handy in Infection Free Zone. In terms of how playable and stable it was, I had around 38 to 40 frames per second , which is stable and playable enough without any issues at the moment. The first horde was not perfectly smooth, but it didn’t slow down. I had a pretty solid frame rate on my main Linux Mint system with the default settings of the game.
The sound is fine; I didn’t notice anything particularly memorable. It all sounds fine, though. At least the dialogues are voice acted, but they’re all in English, nothing but that at least for the time being. I didn’t hear any specific type of music, but the game did have this ambient drone. It wasn’t too loud and suited the game well, and its eerie atmosphere. The only issue I had sound-wise was that the sounds for the wolves that are after you are too loud and horrible. To play the game for a while, I turned down the volume, which meant I couldn’t hear anything else at that time.
To conclude the foregoing and answer the modifying question, I must mention that Infection Free Zone is quite an exciting and hardcore game about post-apocalyptic life . I really like the ability to see the map of real cities, and I hope that in future I will play in my city. Having read the developers’ promises, I realized that they are planning to implement more than 40 buildings, different types of infected, research missions, 10 types of vehicles with upgrades, more weapons, and all in all 30 types of events. It sounds quite promising, and I would like to play the full version. Unfortunately, I have no idea when the game is going to be launched.