Endzone – A World Apart test on the PC from igamesnews.com

As a reminder, Endzone – A World Apart takes you into a not-very-bright future where the rare survivors of a nuclear apocalypse come out of their underground shelter to rebuild an oasis of peace and thrive in a particularly hostile environment. Building a stable and healthy society in a world deregulated by ubiquitous radioactivity and a completely deregulated climate is not supposed to be easy, and Endzone rests on a more specialized management component that also places micromanagement at the center of its experience. Note, however, that when the game offers a handful of scenarios that aren’t necessarily exciting Since they only set limited goals to test your knowledge of mechanics, he primarily opts for a sandbox philosophy with parts with configurable configurations at will.

A real cocktail of influences

If we could easily sum up Gentlymad Studio’s title, we could say without hesitation that it is a cross between Frostpunk and Banished. In many respects, Endzone borrows many of their excellent ideas from their colleagues while retaining the charm of every game in the genre, namely the establishment of an autonomous production line. As is common in the genre, you’ll start out with just a handful of settlers and just a few basic needs. You must therefore first supply your makeshift camp with water, wood and food by fishing and farming.to meet the needs of your citizens who also need to have their own roof over their heads so that they have enough privacy to reproduce. Because we created Banished for one of these reasons: the game’s population is born, grows, lives and dies, and its life cycle directly affects the workforce available.

In Endzone you are in fact constantly obliged to keep an eye on the setting of your infrastructures. Some buildings require minimal manpower, and you can increase them up to a certain limit to increase the productivity of the building in question. If you don’t have enough manpower to gather debris to turn it into metal, you may have to take a few hands off the loggers to lend a hand on the building that produces the most important resource. This will be the common thread of Endzone, which is not satisfied with being a pure personal game.Because these colonists will be necessary to satisfy them, look after them and provide them with a little entertainment to please them so that they are in good health and have a desire to breed in your colony, otherwise they will You Do It You quickly find yourself with too many old at death’s door and with no children to take over. Of course, this requires careful use of your resources because happy people are more prone to childbirth and each birth is an extra worker in the making, but it’s also an extra mouth to nourish and hydrate, which can be complex in the end zone. The title is therefore pretty well thought out, not necessarily obvious, but micromanagement enthusiasts will already see plenty of opportunities there to hone their colony’s establishment and economy.

Climatic considerations

The climate plays a very important role here. A meteorological timeline warns you of future benefits or disasters. A period of uncontaminated rain will irrigate your soils and be a source of drinking water for as long as you have built a rainwater collector. However, radioactive downpours are contaminating your land, which then has to be disinfected by building the appropriate building. In addition, regular periods of drought damage your soils and dry up drinking water sources.Therefore, it is always advisable to plan your resource reserves well so as not to feel unprepared at the height of the heat wave. Endzone is a game that has thought of almost everything and gives you a lot of leeway to adapt your constructions and resources better and better to the rigors of your time.

Plus, the game doesn’t stop there, giving you a ton of different things to do in order to stay busy all the time, which is not a bad thing as the pace of the game is especially slow even as you speed up the game in time to the max. To give you an idea, building a building will first require your staff to decontaminate the soil and then reclaim the resources needed to construct the building, if they are available at all, to make the industry go for good. Depending on the poor placement of your storage rooms, and even if you’ve drawn roads to speed up the transit of materials, the set can be particularly long and the less patient players can conflict with the overall pace of the game. But like we told you, the first few seasons will always keep you busy with the part.and will be able to ensure the happiness of your citizens and also try to answer their complaints once you have set up a forum. These complaints are just short-term goals that will lower the colony’s overall morale in the event of failure and benefit you in the event of success. However, we have regularly found that the deadlines for responding to certain inquiries are very tight if you haven’t planned things out in advance. This can be very frustrating, especially since the game is forgiving nothing or almost nothing.

Are we walking around fast?

You can pass laws, control births, for example start expeditions that need to be configured, for example to collect new seeds for your plantations, or even look for new technologies to increase your defenses and withstand the onslaught of some surrounding gangs. However, this point is out of balance and rather confused and ultimately turns out to be a source of boredom rather than excitement over the idea of ​​fending off an invasion that it will never be possible to respond to anyway. In short, the content is not lacking and the end zone is particularly complete. The main pitfall of the game, very entertaining and quite immersive, one has to admit, however, lies precisely in its sandbox approach. When there are a lot of ways to make your games more or less simple and there are a lot of buildings, If you have played a good twenty hours and have mastered the insides, you have no particular interest in restarting a game. Endzone, in principle, doesn’t really offer the feeling of great progress one can strive for in a management game, and it’s not aided by too much harmony in the buildings that struggle to differentiate between them. Often times it is also mandatory to go through the construction menu to select a type of building just to highlight those of the same type already built, which is necessary as almost all buildings have their own options, such as rangers whom you can ask to close trees fell or rather reforest.

It’s pretty unhappy because end zone is too much like an eternal race to harvest resources. The game seems to be systematically trying to put you in inadequate positions, which goes very well with its theme, but it fails to diversify its theme enough that the player never tires of grappling with what ends up being gets a little more nervous than your average “simple” resource farming game. The tech tree gives some sense of advancement and makes your life a little easier, but even basic resources sometimes struggle to gain their own autonomy and too often you will be forced to complete trivial tasks while concerns should be of greater magnitude Worry about you It’s a philosophy that stays that doesn’t make the game uncomfortable but doesn’t make it as satisfying as we would have liked.