Let’s start by unmasking the culprit that hides behind the name 'Nordic Legacy' say hi to Carl Olander...
https://twitter.com/HauntedDevelopr
Yes get your double headed snake emoji's ready. It's going to be one of those reviews. Strangely enough though, this thumbs down is more aimed at the developer himself than the actual game he created, I'll explain why later.
Zone 22 is about what life would be like if Hitler had won the war and is kind of broken up into three acts.
Act 1: The intro scene forces us to watch a single father get separated from his daughter and transported to a concentration camp in Zone 22. You would think that maybe this daughter thing might be somewhat consequential down the track as surely he would miss her wouldn’t he? Wouldn't he be demanding to various soldiers about wanting to see her? Nope he just immediately forgets her and she is never brought into the game again. So why add her in the first place?
From here on it becomes somewhat a concentration camp simulator. A deleted part of the game which required us to drag dead bodies to a refuse pile was deleted by the developer simply because a Jim Sterling youtube video frowned upon it. But none of the bugs were fixed, no proper direction on what a player needed to do was added. In fact there is very little to do in the concentration camp at all. Let’s see...
You go to bed.
You wake up.
You see someone get shot.
You go get some apples to eat or give away.
You take a packet of cigarettes.
You walk over to a man who is talking about the women of the camp and how they are put in a different area also known as district B and asks you to take 15 guesses what B stands for when it comes to women.
Again you might think that a secret area where all the women are kept might become a pivotal issue down the track. Nope... serves to no purpose what so ever. So why bring it up in the first place?
Finally you get to dob someone in for stealing or you become his victim. That's it. That's the end of Act 1. Whole thing should take you 20 minutes maximum. While the concentration camp simulator is an edgy idea. It's rather limp wristed in its delivery. No real hard issues are raised or dealt with? Issues regarding 'Torture', 'Gas Chambers’, ‘Solitary Confinement', 'Segregation’, ‘Tyrannical Control' are never properly explored. So why put us in an area where we do pretty much nothing? The whole concentration camp idea seemed rather pointless and short.
Act2: Because we are a dibber dobber we get promoted to District A, here we are rewarded a small apartment and the ability to do constant manual labour for the Nazi’s in the form of arduous production so that we can get paid a pittance and slowly improve our living conditions. From here on the game becomes a production work simulator. I pity someone who does production work in real life only to log into Steam and do production work in a game. However amazingly it does a pretty good job portraying how cold it feels when you’re just a number, and you have to keep asking yourself why am I doing this.
However here we have our first BIG LIE from our developer. He claims that there are 8 work stations. There isn't, and on top of that only 2 of them work properly to the point where they are advantageous money wise for you. They are 'bullet control' and 'box filler'. To make matters worse levelling up is slow and at first you haven't a clue in the world what to actually level up. So this means that you have to eventually spend about 28 hrs doing production work to get anywhere in the game. I kid you not. The bulk of the game is production work. 2 Boring jobs constantly.
By now you’re thinking this is some type of psychological experiment. But wait it gets worse. The money you do get, you have to spend constantly on high priced things like an apple for 150 bucks. There are basically 'NO' novelty goodies to spend money for yourself other than a broken TV, some uninspiring pictures, a clock and a radio which is probably the best purchase of them all. If you could decorate your house more and even your work stations then maybe it would be more acceptable, but 28 literal fruiting hrs of production work...SERIOUSLY??? And i forgot the best part, the game doesn't allow you to do the same job twice. So if you only want to do the advantageous jobs, you have to keep exiting out of game completely and logging back in after every production day.
Act 3: By now your praying that someone rescues you from this life of hell, now we are introduced to the underground rebels. Again everything they want is extremely costly and requires you to do another several life times of production work. On top of that they are completely stupid and don't know how to do anything for themselves. So after you have spent a whole day on the production line, you have to go around and do everything they can't. This is probably the most fun part of the game. Going around breaking cameras, sabotaging ATM's, hacking search lights. Problem is that most of the quests are bugged or very poorly explained and some don't turn off at all.
Eventually at some point after all your hands are wrinkled because of production work and you’ve seen as many boxes as you can in one lifetime, then finally you can act on all your hard work tearing away at the regime by orchestrating 'The Event'. This is where all your comrades run out onto a field and do a big group hug in front of constant bullet fire and no one gets hurt. Yes the ending is completely bugged and doesn't work. The developer claims that this game has 17 different endings, but not even one of them works. He claims 36 different quests, the game can hardly ever tell you when you've done one of them correct or what you need to do.
So let’s look at what we have...
Act 1 Pointless and Short
Act 2 28 Hrs of long and pointless
Act 3 Group Hug let’s all be shot forever.
Carl Olander says that this is worth $15.00 of your hard earned money. Carl Olander promised way back in Jun 2015 that there would be updates every two weeks and a finished product within 4 months. Carl Olander claims that he has become silent and deaf eared to complaints because he is busy redesigning everything, though he has for over a year now given not even a snippet of proof regarding this, but continues to play games on Steam himself. One questions where his priorities lie, definitely not to the customer, nor to the product he advertises. Yes Carl Olander may have spent too much time with his product and has become a deceitful, unfair, ruler of this overpriced world of Zone 22.
Below is me showing you the ending that doesn’t work for well over a year… It should be enough of an example for you to not buy it.
https://youtu.be/ExWCLJIu0c0
A very promising idea with a huge amount of potential, but developed by a non-committed, silent party. For a game all about hard work ironically it seems something that the developer of this game is not accustomed to.
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