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Zombie Death Town |
$1.00 |
Average Rating:2.7 / 5 |
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I don't mind the simple combat system, some of the narrative was good and I enjoy the point about the futility of it all. However I disliked the use of North, South East and West when you know the town and perhaps road names could be used to navigate? The annoying maze where 50 room descriptions are the same except one (this just makes to skim read to spot the difference) and the broken element regarding the access card.
Shame as I'd love to see more solo games made.
Not really worth the money when $1 can get you so much more games-wise these days.
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This really isn't much of a game. You're led by the nose through pre-scripted encounters with a rather lame combat system, and every ending involves you dying. Why do I even bother to play a solo story game if my choices boil down to "Eaten to death or shot to death"? It's one thing to have a dark ending, it's another entirely when it feels like the author wanted to just laugh at you when you fail to survive, again, because there's no way to survive.
I suppose if you like playing games with a sadist GM who decides to nuke your character every time he gets bored, it's a rather similar experience...
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Even though this product costs only 2 bucks it is totally not worth spending your money on. There is no real RP experience involved, just a kindergarten-level combat system and a plot without proper ending. The sole reason I give this "game" 2 stars is that it has a bunch of decent jokes in it and it is about zombies. Everything is better with zombies, right?)
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A very good well thought out single player game. I hope that more of these are created.
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Played it, enjoyed it, but not really much there. The narrative is excellent, much more descriptive than most solo by-the-numbers adventures. But far too many non-active choices, so literally nothing happens for several picks; there are too few actual combat encounters and too few "lucky you, found a helpful object" encounters, and too many (admittedly funny) "oops just got eaten by the zombies and nuthin' you can do about it."
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I try to review things for what they are. In this case, the book is a very short, rules light zombie game for one player and a GM. It isn't meant to be terribly in-depth or complicated. If you want to run a quick game for someone who likes zombies and horror games, yet doesn't want to learn a complicated system, this will work fine. I think the story is really fun. You can learn the game in 5 minutes. After you create the character, you run through the choose your own adventure style story until you likely die. Sorry, it is called Zombie Death Town. You could use the same rules to run your own zombie story as well. For what it is, this pretty much met my expectations. Sure, it's not the most robust game on earth, but you can sit down and run through it in 15-30 minutes.
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Zombie Death Town is a good example of a budget Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, the writing is very good and features some great scenes and ideas (one in particular had me burst out laughing, whilst another actually made me feel shocked) actaully , the fighting mechanics work well and you're getting you money's worth in my opinion.
However there are a number of flaws with the product, which will be the focus of my review and I'll address in a primarily spoiler free way as much as possible.
The first is a minor gripe about the description of the how the combat system works, the problem is that it swaps between using 1st and 3rd person perspectives, even in the same short sentences.
When it explains you making an attack for example, it starts by saying you make a roll and then says to "check the total against the Combat Score (CS) of the attacker", in my opinion it would have been much easier to say "check the total against YOUR Combat Score (CS)" or alternitively simplify the entire thing to simply "If the attacker rolls under their Combat Score (CS) they have sucessfully hit."
The second is the maze-like portions of the story, the first involves you randomly walking through the streets with no sense of where you're going, which will often result in you re-reading till you find a link to a different section of the book. The second involves you literally reading the same text over and over again (9 times!!!) to make you way through a room full of cubicles noted as being identicle and unfeatureless due to company policy, honestly this part of the book really pissed me off and I quickly searched through the page directions at the bottom of each of the nine entries to find the one that took me where all this was going to lead.
To address these, I'd suggest giving some explanation to where a certain road would potentially lead in the case of the first situation; and in the second, I'd suggest completely replacing the entire 9 entries with either some variation or with the first entry requiring the player to roll until they get a 6 for example, with an increasing change of finding a zombie each time they fail.
The third is the lack of alternate variations and the potential for constant reruns of the same scenes. Some books of this type, for example, offer "If this is the second time you've been here, go to XX instead", honestly instead of filling the book's count of entries with things like the copy-paste cubicle maze (described above) this would have made a sensible addition. This would also prevent fighting the same unique enemies or doing the same unique actions over and over again.
In addition at times you are required to move through a house and return to a down-stairs and up-stairs hallways respectively to get from room to room, it would make more sense for each room to instead allow you to move straight to the entries for the next one, or back up/down stairs instead of forcing you to rerun the hallway entries.
The forth is the inclusion of multiple attacker rules, set against every encounter with multiple attackers (except a random change one) resulting in instant death. Honestly I really wanted to try my hand at each of these encounters (and there were quite a few of them) but instead the result was "Oh no a pack of zombies, you're automatically dead." Like the alternative paths option mentioned above, I'd really like to see the option to fight a pack of zombies, without needing a separate GM.
Now I may sound harsh about some of these things, especially considering this was a budget product, but let me assure you that I ultimately loved the book. That said, I also considered the simplicity of the book's format and hope that a future re-release of this product or future products, might take this opinions to heart.
Thanks for reading my review, and don't let my opinions prevent you from giving this a try, because there's gold in them zombie infested hills...
Cheers
Rowan/LSWSjr
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Zombie Death Town is exactly what it says on the cover. Every ending ends you, so to speak. This doesn't make it so bad, but it is a little lacking in depth. While it's fun for a quick play, it's not really a huge game, and while combat is easy enough to survive, lots of situations kill you by fiat.
As I said before, it's good, but shallow and short. What I'd really have liked is if it had gone on about 50% longer before the inevitable happens, because as is the only way to spend more than 15 minutes on it is getting lost or reading very slowly. Some places don't seem to let you exit back to the city (namely the lab, which doesn't really have anything interesting except death and some horror-fic style stuff). It's actually pretty well written in my opinion, even if not everything has been viewed through the lenses of common sense (though that does make you like a zombie survivor, it doesn't really give you a full range of actions). Also, apparently re-entering your house is the same as deciding to hide in the basement (where you will die), which is another of my gripes.
However, it's basically a choose-your-own adventure book (which I loved as a child), combined with a more traditional roleplaying game (which I loved much more recently), so it's not all bad, and it is an engaging horror game.
Ultimately, if you need something for a roadtrip or similar venture, this is as good a thing as any, though you'll wanna bring something else, also. The author also included rules for playing the game in a group setting, but I haven't tested those. It gets above average, for managing to be a horror game that engages me.
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Creator Reply: |
Thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to review the game. -Charlie |
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