If you have scrolled through the screenshots on this game review you might have figured out what Endzone – A World Apart is – a survival base building and resourcing gathering game – and you’d be right.
The game is played from an isometric view with the player rotating the camera over the post-apocalyptic vista, each map is densely populated with items, animals and wrecks. There is a lot to take onboard if anyone jumps into the survival or challenges mode.
Fortunately, there is a lengthy tutorial to get a new player running. They start off with a small group of survivors and base of operations. They are then required to collect raw materials, setup a stable spot to collect food and power and then slowly grow the number of survivors and the size of the base. Recycling, scavenging, hunting and
There is the usual time control speed up a lengthy build process, or slow down to deal with some intense micro-management. It is possible to set up way points for settlers for more complicated automated processes to breakdown commands among the many and diverse jobs that can be assigned to the survivors. There are pretty standard jobs like builder, but it spins out to distillers and recyclers.
Endzone introduces a lot of little details that I had not seen in previous games in the genre. For example, time passage is really important as seasons will introduce droughts or monsoons that will impact crops and necessitate a spreading of resources to keep the base robust.
Once the tutorial is over it is down to the player to decide what they want to do. As mentioned, the main two modes are Survival mode and Challenges (the latter acts as a sort of story mode). Survival is very much a ‘make your fun’ mode with each map generated making new problems and obstacles to overcome. This is where I imagine most people will gravitate towards.
It would have been easy to mess this game up on consoles, but the controller interface is complex and intuitive all-important commands are a button press away and most important commands are no more than two menus deep.
I think that some people are going to love being able to delve this deep into all of the macro and micromanagement options but for me Endzone tailored too much into the nitty gritty. This will not reflect in my final score as I think that what the game goes for, it absolutely nails. I just don’t tend to stay with a game like this because of how fiddly it can become.
Conclusion
Endzone – A World Apart is one of the most comprehensive base-building survival management sims I’ve seen. There is a lot to do here, it just might be too much for some.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
