As a true fan of zombie games I was dreaming about massive hordes, awesome powers from virus's mutations, fearsome human resistance and great strategies...
I was wrong.
[Long review, updated 3 times, last entry the 06/07/2015]
THE LAYOUT:
You are a virus capable to create zombies from dead humans and manipulate your dna to throw horrible powers.
Your goal: kill humankind.
GAME MODES:
The first one is Skirmish:
Your goal exterminate all humans. To help you, you start with few zombies and marked locations such as radio towers, military depots that you can destroy to slow army spawning rate. Each kills brings a new zombie and some times you gain genes to summon a special unit (4 in total).
Since the update of Virus 14 into Infect and Destroy 05/12/2015, the game plays like a rts. To get units you use your few zombies who represents a horde and run into buildings wich represents cities. Every time you run into a building, it collapses leaving a cloud or hundreds of chunks. Military units stays on the ground, even helicopters. This reworked skirmish is on tracks, because now the game has a view from above and a minimap to see where your zombies are and important locations. So on the rts aspect the game, now, looks better but it's sad that you don't have special skills anymore. Because special zombies are just a way to make hordes more resilient.
The new maps added for the rts/skirmish rework of the game are questionable.
First on the second map, your starting zombies are out of view. You need to clic on the mini map to find them.
Second is the new hunger system. If you don't kill humans, your hunger bar will reach zero wich means game over. Instead of 10 mins timer, you now have to rush and kill everything to stay alive.
So many maps are impossible, due to very powerfull soldiers (they now have artillery weapons who acts like sentry turrets), and the lack of time. The 2 new maps are good clues of this problems.
The first one are few islands where the main one is heavily guarded, you have to reach the others to create your hordes. The time your hordes spend in water is so important that you will surely loose (add to that poor controls as i said before).
Or the other one where you start with a massive horde (i like the new ground skin wich represents infected dirt), your hunger bar drops so quickly that you can't even reach the city behind army's defenses !
The only original mod/map, is the one where you play against antibodies in a human cell. You have to destroy (push virus strains to) a dna chain to win. You can infect blood cells to replicate the virus and mix them to make bigger and stronger virus cells. Not bad but slow paced with not much variety and quite buggy (few times the dna didn't collapsed, so i didn't won even with if dna's health depleeted).
The second one is World domination:
You use few hordes on the world map (a really disturbing sphere) to destroy cities and get more hordes to infect the world. You can "build" zombie's structures to increase horde's spawn rate, strengh, dna research's rate, ect... By talking about researches you can modify your hordes with a menu where health, speed, contamination and some other options can be upgraded.
Seems fun at first, but the game is horribly long. You are unable to save and to finish... it's horribly boring!
No different hordes, stress or moral indicators are absolutely useless (frankly i don't know how to manage it and i don't see what's the difference between each moral states especially for humans). You can even receive nuclear missiles on infected cities. Human defenses are always the same: few soldiers, helicopters, and planes to deliver bombs. But the worse is related to fights and performances. When you kill soldiers, the ground will be covered with a huge pool of blood (1 pool can cover 1/4 of U.S.A). But the most difficult is that with burning cities and blood pools it increases memory usage dramatically ! Quickly, on my computer, the fps drops and makes this game mod barely playable.
CONTROLS:
Much better there are still big issues. Like for the second skirmish map where your starting zombies are out of view. You need to clic on the mini map to find them.
You are unable to make groups (you have to select on your screen zombies you need for attacks). An overall lack of shortcuts, wich is a real problem, because you loose the precious time needed to set up strategies and synchronize your attacks.
Or when you press escape to leave a menu like the one for special zombies and it brings up the yes or no to quit the game...
The most disturbing is the game's map for World domination where you can't have a global view of earth... you have to drag all the time something that could have been flat.
GRAPHICS:
The game is ugly and maps are empty. As an example buildings explodes like piles of polystyrene and you have random objects like hotdog carts or bus stops scattered everywhere on maps without any reasons like buildings in general. No coherant cities, roads, and human activity in general.
I don't ask for the new SimCity 15 000, but you could have done better.
And World Domination is too unstable.
Really sad especially on a game with so much potential!
MUSIC:
Musics are good and i'm happy that devs have fixed it.
Maybe more related to your in-game actions.
TO CONCLUDE:
In Early access of course but there is no fun to send zombies to kill stupid humans and blad soldiers ( why bald soldiers ?!).
Actually, even using special infected is uninterresting. You can't activate special skills (skills for special infected would be cool) or use movements such as jumping, climbing, crouching, ect...
.
This game needs a lot, A LOT of work to bring a sufficient interrest.
Infect and Destroy is too limited and World domination brings nothing better to the game.
To players:
Wait further updates because Infect and Destroy is actually (06/07/2015) too unpolished and even if some players might have fun on the game, for me it's not the case.
To developpers:
Please, make Skirmish maps longuer or give us ways to make custom scenarios because the hunger system is really annoying.
Your game is too limited and be ware, you've changed the gameplay (it's allright for me) but frankly there are no strategies. Raising undead and throw them on soldiers is not interresting especially because controls are not optimized and maps are not funny (why did you add random items scattered on the map without creating coherent cities?).
Keep it up guys, take your time and do something great !
N.B: Can you try to bring one or two decent maps and maybe new game mechanics ? Why not new ways to get zombies, new ways to act like a horde ? To merge zombies into a real horde would be awesome, even merging in general to show the horribles capacities of the virus. The ultimate zombie should me more like a shapeless mass of fusionned zombies instead of a big zombie bodybuilder fed with virus. Managing zombies/human as a building material and troops like stealth approaches, especially on world domination to show impact of moral and virus discovery would be a great addition.
And the most important: give us a roadmap. We want to know what do you want to achieve with this game. To go from action game to rts is a big step wich could mislead potential buyers.
Thanks for reading.
