Death comes to all especially the unprepared on horde night.
Night of the Dead is a zombie survival game that mixes both survival craft gameplay and tower defense. The game is developed and published by Jackto Studios a South Korea-based game development studio. Survival games have been around since the 1970’s with an early example of true survival gameplay popping up in UnReal World which was created by Sami Maarnanen and placed the players in the harsh conditions of Finland during the Iron Age despite the game being roguelike and more popular examples of the genre being Minecraft.
Night of the Dead was first released in early access on the 28th of August 2020. With the game being a survival horror the biggest goal is to survive for as long as possible. Night of the Dead makes this a bit easier with its tower defense mechanics, allowing you to sit back and relax if needed, as zombies are ground up and crushed under your satisfying amount of traps and defenses.
Unlike other zombie-based survival games such as 7 Days to Die or DayZ, where you must build up until the 7th day to prepare for the horde of zombies. Night of the Dead horde night, however, happens every 24hrs. Unfortunately, you can’t just face the horde head meaning having a solid trap base and normal base set up quickly is highly crucial in the first few nights as the waves get harder over time with tougher zombies to watch out for.
This makes the Tower Defence element the biggest highlight of Night of the Dead’s gameplay. There are many different traps, weapons, and armor that you can build to make the gameplay as smooth as possible for any playstyle whether you jump in like Rambo with full melee or hang back and take headshots while letting all your traps do the work on a horde night.
It’s important to keep in mind that while you can tear apart your surroundings for the needed resources. Not all of them will respawn, if you don’t have the setting ticked in the difficulty setting, such as trees, rocks, and chunks of iron so exploring your surroundings and the decently large map is your best bet for resource management. When exploring the cities you can find rarer loot such as better armor, weapons, ammunition, and even books needed for research.
Night of the Dead has both a leveling system and a research tree. In the leveling system, you can pick and choose where in your stats the extra points sit allowing you to customize your character’s stats as you progress. The Research Tree adds to your passive stats, active stats and unlocks better gear and crafting recipes to use as you progress, such as the flamethrower.
You start off with basic equipment at the beginning of the game but as you progress you can craft and scavenge better equipment. Although much like any other zombie-based game you have to contend with how much noise you make. While a gun deals a lot of damage it is also highly noisy which isn’t helpful when you are trying to sneak around a zombie-infested city. Meanwhile, bows and melee weapons can create little noise although bows deal less damage than guns.
There are many different craft stations you can create to help you get everything up and running within a few in-game hours. Most of the crafting stations just require you to place them down and research the subsequent recipes, If you don’t already have them unlocked, needed for more advanced crafting but three workbenches can be upgraded. One of the workbenches is the Materials workbench, in this workbench you can process Wood, Stones, and ores to create the needed base ingredients for all your crafting needs.
The next upgradable workbench is the crafting workbench which allows you to create materials such as trap machines, rope, rubber nails, and even research data for the research desk. Much like the Material workbench the the higher the level of the workbench the more items you can craft. The last upgradable workbench is the campfire, upgrading it allows you to cook more food. Each item of food has a calorie amount, the higher the calories the more it will fill your hunger bar.
You have three different bars to keep track of in Night of the Dead. Your health bar, a stamina bar, and your hunger bar. You can upgrade your stats such as endurance for more stamina, and vitality for more health with every level up. You can also increase stats via the research desk. There are different categories to research such as survival which allows you to increase your carry weight and your attack speed with material-gathering tools. You can also increase your passive modifiers such as protection and damage.
The combat system in Night of the Dead is a little stiff when fighting with melee, while it works well it doesn’t feel as fleshed out as the tower defense aspect of the game. While there are indicators that show up on the zombies’ body when attacking with a melee weapon or in close range to show the zombies’ weak points it’s still easier when playing solo to attack their limbs while your companion tanks their damage with a shield.
Companions are NPCs that you can find and ask to join you although there is a limit to how many NPCs you can have as companions. The AI for the companions can be annoying outside of combat but you can set them to do tasks such as gathering materials while you’re looting around houses or mining stone and iron. Companions automatically equip weapons and use both food items and healing items if it’s in their inventory. You can only have one follow until level 50.
The sound engineering in Night of the Dead is well executed in terms of the sound effects and soundtrack. The soundtrack can become tedious after a long enough time of grinding in the game. The harvesting sound effects were done well and most sounded crisp and impactful when grinding away your time until horde night.
The sound design of the zombies was on point and added to the scare factor of the game, especially on horde night. The voice acting however could use some work. While some lines were delivered well, the rest was a less than stellar performance as most of the voice actors sounded as if they didn’t have the most experience delivering lines.
The graphics of Night of the Dead are well done which is expected as the game is made with Unreal Engine 4. The game has a great character creation for those who don’t want to use the base model however while you can change just about everything about your character, eye color always seems to remain blue. The zombie designs are highly varied and well thought out adding to the scare factor that you would expect from a survival horror.
Overall, Night of the Dead is a pretty decent survival horror that combines survival craft gameplay and tower defense. Despite the stiff animations, the offputting AI and the inconsistent voice acting it is the gameplay of Night of the Dead that keeps you coming back. If you don’t like grinding or spending a lot of time exploring the game is definitely not for you.
