THE DEAD TIMES
DEAD ARE COMING...
The Last Stand: Aftermath
Recently launched on Kickstarter and looking for backers, is a fell Zombie video game which I find intriguing - enough even to resurrect the decaying The Kickstarter & The Kickstarted article category. The game in question is The Last Stand: Aftermath (Kickstarter Page) and, at this time, will, if successfully funded, launch on PC. It is a continuation of the, apparently fabled, Last Stand series of Zombie games which were all free-to-play web games. Aftermath, however, is a fully-fledged standalone game with much more technical prowess - a quick gander at the animated screenshots or campaign trailer show that this game is no slouch in the graphical department and more than capable of rendering, in disturbing detail, the unholy ghouls we all love.
The story
The game takes place a whopping 15-years after a Zombie outbreak that decimated the population and effectively ended civilization as we know it. The Zombie plague has, in those long 15-years, pretty much fizzled-out - it still exists and the undead hordes still roam the land, but knowing safe routes through the tattered landscape and having learnt how to deal with the roaming undead, humanity is able to live alongside the dead ones. However, that has changed now, the world has become deadly again; a mutation in the virus perhaps, the ungodly scenario where the undead horrors begin to evolve - no one knows for sure? So, when you, playing as a random survivor get bitten by a Zombie, infecting you with the dreaded virus of undeath, in fear of terrors ahead, it comes as no surprise when the community you are part of kick you out of the group, sending you away to die in the hostile wastes with only basic supplies and the lethal poison running through your veins (whether you can return to the survivor camp later, murdering them all in hate-fuelled revenge has not yet been disclosed by the developers). With nothing to do, no hope of survival - becoming one of the walking dead is inevitable at this point -, the only way forward is to try and unravel the mystery of the increasingly dangerous world beyond the gates.
Banished to the wastes, only basic supplies, the living dead and a leathal virus coursing through your veins for company
© Steam
The gameplay
The Last Stand: Aftermath is, seemingly, your average Zombie-filled roguelite; you collect loot, kill Zombies of various shapes and sizes, craft materials that cannot be easily found and when you die, you die; that's it, game over, it's onto another character (albeit with some of the knowledge and experience gained through the previous play). The game seems to share some aspects with one of, oddly, my favourite Zombie video games of all time, The Organ Trail in that you travel between destinations of expanded play (randomised, of course). Presumably they'll be a system of balancing travel distance and resource use with loot gain and enemy strength - bullets and other resources that were so common in the old world are far rarer now so areas with high concentrations of the living dead (and, maybe the living) are best avoided.
Standout features
So why does this Zombie game standout from amongst the hordes? Why should I take interest and consider backing? There are a trio of features that caught my putrefying eye - features which are both awesome as described on the campaign page but also offer intriguing possibilities to excite the creative, undead-focused mind.
- Mutations
- Environments
- Tagging for collection by the rest of the group
From the outset of the game, you are dying; treading that slow, painful road toward ultimate oblivion. You've been bitten by a Zombie and there is no cure for the infection that corrupts your blood; eventually, however hard you fight and however long you manage to survive in the hostile wilds, the unseen enemy within will ultimately consume your body, turning you into the very monster that sealed your fate in the first place - a cruelly ironic end. As a side thought, I do wonder if, playing as a new survivor stricken with the same death sentence (or should that be undeath sentence), you will encounter the Zombified version of your former self, in a similar fashion to that seen in Zombi - now that, would be cool. Still, getting back on topic, the Zombie curse that flows through your blood is not all bad - sure, as the infection spreads, your maximum health gets ever smaller, forcing you to consider each potential combat scenario with greater care, but it does gives you access to mutations; special abilities that no one else has or, given the lethal consequences, would want. Want increased resistance to poison? Want to be stronger at night? Want the ability to surge forward briefly with inhuman motion? All these possibilities exist and more will be added before the game releases. I do hope the developers keep all the 'bonuses' offered by mutations "themed"; things that can be explained away as mutations caused by the virus and not simple increased powers or inexplicably learnt skills.
Set 15-years after civilization fell, you'd expect nature to have started spilling into the man-made constructions of the past. From the introductory trailer and few screenshots, I am, quite literally, blown away with the eye-catching detail - derelict cars rust in hulks on cracked roads, lined with untended grass and pot-marked by trees that will no-longer be held back by concrete or asphalt. The environments look exactly as they should and remind me of those seen in the blockbusting triple-A video game The Last of Us Part II - a massive credit to the small team of indie developers working on this project. It remains to be seen though, just how varied these locations will be, how expansive and how detailed. Will there be different types of enemies for areas that are set in different locations? Will 'levels' be open enough to allow tactical play while restricted enough so as to maintain forward momentum? Will all buildings be enterable or just a few?
This is a very small addition to a relatively large game but I am very excited by it nonetheless. Basically, if I understand the brief mention correctly, when you find an item of loot that you do not have room for in your inventory, you can 'tag' it for collection by the rest of the group and it will magically appear back at base so that, following your certain death, it is ready for the next unlucky survivor to use. Now, I think this is a really neat concept as it fits into the story well; if the survivor group keeps sending people who are bit and dying anyway out into the hostile world and those banished survivors keep radioing back resources to collect, why not keep doing this morally-questionable act whenever a colonist is bitten? However, I would like there to be some consequence of 'tagging' items for later retrieval; I mean, you're effectively telling someone to travel to a location and risk their own life to retrieve an item that you deem important. There should be some consideration in the group, behind-the-scenes, invisible to the player, as to whether retrieval of a tagged resource is worth it or some hidden prioritisation algorithm so a player cannot simply run around tagging all the items they do not have room to carry. Alternatively, perhaps there is some kind of 'remembered-consequence' system so the more items you tag, or the further those items are away from the survivor camp, the more Zombies there are in subsequent playthroughs.
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DESCRIPTION:
Behold the rise of a new The Kickstarter & The Kickstarted article. This time on the chopping block is an interesting Zombie roguelite called The Last Stand: Aftermath.
CATEGORY:
The Kickstarter & The Kickstarted
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DATE UPLOADED:
04/10/2020