So having done a recent review of Death Road to Canada, a very fun niche title also by Rocketcat Games, I realized I had this one in my library a while back and gave it quite a few hours before dropping it. This isn't a title developed by them AFAIK, rather [i]published[/i], but as it's what I know from them, the comparisons are inevitable. Which is a shame, because my expectations are absolutely colored by that, and I didn't vibe with Cannibal Crossing, and this game isn't a spiritual sequel to DRtC but the comparisons kept coming up. Keep that in mind because my experience might be completely different from someone approaching this without having played DRtC beforehand.
If I had to sum CC up in one word, it would be "unfocused." The runner-up word would be "generic."
This is an open-world top-down pixel-art stealth-action zombie-shooter with survival, crafting, and base-building elements as well as football matches. That last part about football is a lie; I'm just checking to make sure your eyes didn't glaze over from the preceding description. It arrived years too late in a genre that's absolutely saturated with games like it.
Unlike DRtC, which is about you traveling through increasingly difficult stages where you smash and sometimes shoot hordes of zombies to make it through to Canada, this game is your player character of choice being plopped into a (large) town to accomplish a couple of main objectives. The real objective is "kill all the bosses." The secondary main involves 1) doing quests for the townsfolk, and 2) building a base that's competent enough to keep you alive. With each passing day the enemies get stronger and the hordes get more intense, eventually reaching a difficulty of "nearly impossible to manage." On top of that, you have to deal with a potential corruption mechanic that will cut your game short if you don't know how it works.
So most of the fundamental systems work, more or less.
The melee combat *works* but is very block-/parry-reliant and melee swings don't have much impact when you hit things, as opposed to DRtC where the game did a great job of conveying what happens when you scatter a zombie's teeth and organs with a sledgehammer. In CC you swing at a cannibal and they just kind of fall apart or their head unceremoniously falls off as your weapon passes through them.
Shooting is leagues better than DRtC's--in that there are actual manual aiming mechanics involved this time--but on the other hand, shooting as a main method of combat is discouraged due to ammo being a scarcity even considering you can craft it yourself (to a point). And as the cannibals in this game are frequently armed and can shoot back, you [i]have[/i] to do that aplenty.
There's stamina meters, of course, and they're as pace-breaking and annoying as you'd imagine in a game where dodge-rolling around gunfire and parrying melee attacks every three seconds is mandatory in most fights.
Stealth...exists. Technically.
There are obligatory skill trees to improve your various stats, which you'll need to keep pace with the game's increasingly numerous and difficult enemies.
The base building exists, but I am not tower-defense inclined. And you have to do that because one of the game's main ways of ending your run is intermittently flooding you with hordes of opponents, many of which can shoot back this time around, so you need defense systems just to scrape by after a point.
There are super-zombies (referred to as "Negatives" in the game) that can be [i]deeply[/i] unpleasant to deal with no matter who you're playing as or how you're building. They can be as simple as "fast melee enemy" or come with traits that...mix things up. Many of my deaths in this game were a result of wandering somewhere that aggro'd a group of ~50 Negative melee zombies that outsped me [i]and[/i] had too much health to put down in packs [i]and[/i] all of them also had shields that reflected bullets. On a character built for shooting. Tough luck.
At that point all I could do was find two slices of bread to prepare myself for the incoming human coleslaw treatment.
Bosses exist. They're huge bullet sponges in a game where ammo can be scarce. If you're running melee builds, good luck.
And all of this adds up to a game where the systems feel at odds with each other.
I'm supposed to speed through the game and kill all the bosses before the hordes become too much to manage, but the intermittent horde defense encourages base building, which absolutely breaks the pacing of the game. But you can't bring your base with you, so you're expected to go out and roam, except when a warning for the hordes comes in, in which case you need to speed back to the base and play tower defense for a while. Which doesn't gel with the stealth/punch/shoot/find-the-boss nature of the rest of the game. The presence of hunger and sleep meters that will kill you if not attended to only makes this worse because you'll have to stop and loot, find safe places to sleep, cook stuff, etc. to keep these managed, which slows the pace down even more.
Limited ammo discourages shooting because you'll want to save it for bosses, but shooting is arguably your strongest method of offense, and some characters come built for it.
Melee feels unsatisfying even though all the basics for a competent melee system are there, and if you don't build for it, it's not going to help you much.
The randomized nature of the game means your run can end from a particularly ugly group of enemies you literally have no answer for.
It comes off feeling very disjointed, like a box of game mechanics thrown together without regard to how they feed into one another.
There [i]is[/i] co-op, but it's only for a dedicated wave base defense mode, not the main game.
If you liked DRtC's writing, there's a faint whisper of that on display here. Just faintly.
And unlike DRtC, this one hasn't been updated effectively since the game's official launch, so what you see is what you get.
I didn't outright hate this one but it's a pass from me.
