Rebuild 3 | Citybuilding To Die For

Rebuild 3 is the great sequel to the original Rebuild on IOS by Sarah Northway & Friends. If you’ve never played Rebuild, it’s basically a deep sim/building management game where you’re thrown into the middle of a zombie apocalypse, scraping to survive and while leading and keeping your band of survivors safe.

STORY

You start the game by running through customization options for your main character. Sex, body build, hair, the usual rigmarole. It then plunges you into the story through clunky and invariably skippable text walls, explaining how your custom character moves from city to city, surviving the zombie apocalypse. The story is nothing much, though you do get some interesting twists and turns with the sentient zombie factions and finding the cure. The narration is not the point of Rebuild 3, and look to graphic novels and TV shows if you’re more interested in a story line.

The heart of Rebuild 3, and really what will ultimately suck you into for hours on end, is this: The map. You have your main character and the other survivors on the screen, and you send them around the map to do tasks for you. These can range from scouting undiscovered locations, scavenging for food and supplies to clearing out hordes of zombies, reclaiming empty buildings to expand your safe haven to trading with merchants and friendly factions.

GAMEPLAY

Each mission comes with a danger rating, and that determines if your survivors get into trouble if they take on the mission. Sending survivors in groups, or specialized survivors, will increase the safety of the mission. There is no rush to play this game like an RTS because it’s pause-able, allowing you to catch your breath and think before your next step.

Once lands are reclaimed, you’re given the option to build a variety of buildings over that one. Laboratories that give you farming technology or l33t zombie killing skills, workshops to build explosives or convert ammo, schools to teach and reassign specialized survivors and so on. There’re quite a few things to do when you’re rebuilding civilization, and you’ll find yourself swarmed with tasks to accomplish while fending off the undead.

And that’s really it. As the days past, hordes of zombies push against your home like waves upon the shore. If you get overrun, you lose the territory and potentially any survivors that may have been protecting it at the time. This is frustrating, usually because you have to stop everything you were doing to protect yourself against the horde. Guarding the horde is safer but takes longer, and jumping in to attack the horde clears it out much faster but poses a much larger risk. The trade-off becomes a crucial decision in dire times.

Zombies are not the only things to worry about. You need to juggle food and materials as well. Food is produced from farms and take valuable land space. Materials can be harvested from trees and parks indefinitely, but it takes survivors and time to do so, and those are always lacking. Once your basic needs are secure, you’ll need to keep your survivors happy and make sure you have enough space to house them all. Building apartments solve that, but that reduces land space for something else you could’ve built.

A lot of the graphics and what you see in the game is familiar and nostalgic if you’ve played the original. New graphics were added, and it gives the game a more cartoony feel than the grimy, realistic look it tried to achieve before. The interface may be slightly cluttered, but for its depth and complexity, serves well and probably was the best the developer and the UI designers could do. The game’s also got a great track to it, dirty and post-apocalyptic like, along with the immersive ambiance that’ll pull you into its world.

VERDICT

All in all, Rebuild 3 is a SIMS management masterpiece that will suck you in for hours on end. The original Rebuild was a staple back in the day, and this sequel carries everything I liked from it and added on so much more. Get this game, and I promise you this: your commute will never be the same.

It’s time to rebuild.

Telltale's The Walking Dead | Season 2 Review

*SPOILER WARNING FOR BOTH THE WALKING DEAD SEASON 1 AND 2*

STORY

Telltale Games is back in the second season of The Walking Dead Season 2! Lee’s gone, and Clementine’s all by herself now. With no one to depend on and no one she can trust, this season is about Clementine growing up, making tough choices, and learning to survive.

This game, unlike the first, is less focused on the zombie apocalypse, and more of human interaction and politics. Everyone in the world has acclimatized to the situation, and it humans become more fearful than zombies in this second season. There is constant lying and scheming, and sometimes realization comes too late, and fear and suspicion creeps into every statement and choice. Opinions and intentions become dubious, and the audience soon realizes that the living is far more dangerous than the dead.

You play as Clementine here, and the story takes place after the events of Season 1 when Lee left Clementine to find Omid and Christa. Things take a swift turn downhill and Clementine gets left alone to fend for herself. She finds safety and a new group, but trouble’s always around the corner, and the people bring more problems than Clementine can handle by herself. The writers are just as good, and the game does not suffer from ‘sequel syndrome’, but rather, rides out the wave of success from the first season pretty well.

Lee’s death is constantly refreshed in Clementine’s mind, and it’s obvious she misses him constantly. But she pushes on and struggles to survive, and her strength and courage against a dangerous world really makes the audience sympathize with her. Her maturity and independence shine through in Season 2, and some gruesome scenes really emphasize that she’s no longer the innocent, protected girl she used to be in Season 1.

CHOICES

I will still reiterate the problems I had with the first season. Choices are fed to me to give me a sense of freedom, yet still leads me down an arbitrary linear path. I’m less upset at this than the first because I understand the writers and developers do not have the time or capacity to branch out so many twisting storylines. But I’m still frequently brought out of the immersion by unreasonable reactions to some of my choices, and how I felt no matter how kind I was or evil I was, the end result would’ve been the same.

Some deaths felt forced and arbitrary, and there was really nothing I could have done to change the situation either way. The helplessness in the choices are slightly alleviated by understanding that Clementine’s a little girl, but it still feels like my hand was forced, regardless of circumstance.

Saying this, I’m still absolutely entranced by this game, and I’ve been caught between a rock and a tough place several times and struggled immensely to make my choices. The game was psychologically taxing, and I loved how it brought me to the very edges of my morals. It’s a testament to how invested I was in the game.

Season 3 was rumored to be in the works, and at the last episode of season 2, I find it very difficult to imagine how the writers would continue Clementine’s story as there were several different endings, all with very different consequences. Perhaps Clementine’s journey ends there, and we play as a new character in the next season.

VERDICT

In the end, Season 2 of the walking dead was super fun. The story line was satisfying, and the resolution of the last episode was, for once, truly your own choice. It was super tense, super exciting, and super tough. Lee’s raised Clementine well, and they’re both amazing characters to love in this unlovable zombie world. Until Season 3, I know I’m psyched!

Darkest of Nights | Batman: Arkham Origins Review

Welcome to Arkham

The third installment of the Arkham Series, this is a prequel to the first game Arkham Asylum, five years prior in the timeline. It’s Christmas Eve and Arkham's worst has broken out from Arkham Prison. It's up to Batman to stop the bad guys, and survive through the hardest night of his life.

THE STORY

So Batman stumbles upon a plot to end his life, again. The bad guy, Sionus Black, hires the world’s greatest assassins to kill batman through a 50 million dollar bounty on his head. Sure Batman could stay indoors and pass the night, but what kind of fun would that be? Besides, he can’t just the assassins wreck havoc upon Gotham.

Alfred has got dinner warmed up, but Batman’s gotta do what Batman’s gotta do.

THE GRAPHICS

The graphics in the game is stellar. This game's graphics is extremely polished. For an open world game, frame rates are steady without any noticeable lag or pops. Object interactions are smooth, and Batman reacts well to his environments, jumping off walls mid-combo, with destructible objects galore.

The cut scenes are superb. There is a clear difference in the CGI and in-game cutscenes, but the quality difference isn’t extremely noticeable. The good thing is that the way they laid out the cut scenes really immerse you in the game. It would flow straight from mid combat to cut scene to plot line development and segue back to gameplay.

THE SOUND

I was disappointed that the Kings of Batman VO, Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill did not reprise their iconic roles for this game, but with talents like Roger Craig Smith, and Troy Baker as the Joker, our main characters were preserved well. They are famous in the industry, and kudos for their brilliant voice acting in this game.  

THE GAMEPLAY

Interestingly, there was a decision to provide access to the majority of the equipment at the start, so the learning curve is slightly steeper than the previous batman games. They automatically assume you know ground takedown is RT+Y (triangle) and that combo takedowns are Y+B and so on, without teaching you in some sort of tutorial. The lack of scaffolding may turn new players to the series off.

Combat is smooth, if not smoother than previous games, and you’ll find yourself enjoy watching Batman using his different combos and moving around and interacting with the environment accordingly. The game mixes it up with hand to hand combat, puzzles which you use your tools to solve, cryptographic sequence puzzles, and predator missions.

The predator missions are, in my opinion, the best. You feel bad-ass swooping around from gargoyle to gargoyle, hanging bad guys and taking down unsuspecting sniper watches. Then you sneak around and silently take down foes. It absolutely nails the mood of a Batman game.

The difficulty is moderate throughout the game. If you’re familiar with Asylum and City, you’re probably not gonna have problems, but on New Game+, clearing large groups of enemies have proven to be quite difficult for me, personally.

All I can advise you is, keep calm, be on the defensive, dodge as many attacks as you can, and fit in as many punches as you can in between without leaving yourself too vulnerable.

FINAL VERDICT

In the end, I enjoyed the game through and through. It proved difficult at some points, but it was challenging, not torturing. I really love this game and really just can’t fault it. The story moved at a good pace, and even though there was quite a bit of traveling in between, I didn’t really mind, cause there were a lot of things to do. I got sidetracked constantly, with the many side missions along the way.

I never was short or something to do. I got lost in Arkham City the way a good game should immerse you in. Everything you do, batman say, draws you deeper into that world. Every plot line and development make you yearn for more. This is really something every batman fan can’t miss.