Rebuild is the game of the TV show Walking Dead wants to be

Posted by on May 15, 2012 in Reviews

We’re running low on food. We need more people to man the walls during the occasional zombie attacks. But every time I send someone out for food, we have to spend a tense night hoping the undead loitering outside the walls don’t hit us tonight, hoping they’ll wait until after everyone gets back, hoping the scavengers will return with enough food to buy us a few more days to try to recruit another soldier. And we’ve just spotted a horde three days from our position. So all told, I have bigger problems than the low morale. Yeah, everyone’s unhappy. Tell me something I don’t know.

But morale doesn’t matter until it matters. Then it really matters. Tonight, tempers flared and a fight breaks out. Our most experienced soldier kills the scientist who was researching a cure. At least the food will last a little longer with one less mouth to feed. But in the morning, with a horde only two days out, it will be the beginning of the end. This zombie apocalypse isn’t going to end well. Maybe Rebuild, a deliciously bleak, gratifyingly intricate, and surprisingly story-driven zombie apocalypse strategy game, should have a less optimistic name.

After the jump, they’re coming to get you, [insert name here]

Rebuild is a turn-based game about capturing and holding territory. You use your characters to secure more city blocks so you can have more characters. Occasionally, zombies try to take it back. At first just a few, milling around mostly harmless. Soon more than a few. They start banging on the walls. It gets harder and harder to keep them out. Eventually veritable zombie tsunamis are crashing against your barricades.

But the brilliance of Rebuild is that it’s not always the zombies that get you. Just ask my scientist who died last night. Or the scavenger killed by wild dogs. Or the woman I sold into slavery for a pair of rocket launchers. Or the people who’ve starved to death. Rebuild adds plenty of detail: character skills that level up, useful equipment, special buildings, tech research, morale, food. Like any good zombie movie, the undead aren’t the only problem.

If you play Rebuild at the easier difficulty levels, which is a great way to figure out the basics, you’ll find lots of replay value to encourage you to explore. You’ll discover the unfolding gameplay and the branching storylines that wend their way to various victory conditions. This is a great single-player single-session adventure, like Elder Sign: Omens. It has a firm grasp on the premise that fewer decisions make for more important decisions which make for higher stakes which make for more important decisions.

But when you play Rebuild as a game about earning a high score, you’re going to eventually bump up the difficulty level. This is a game that does a scoring systems exactly as it should be done. Failing a game on a harder difficulty level will get your more points than winning a game on an easier difficulty level. The post-game debriefing explains exactly why you got as many points as you got. So once you’ve learned the basics, you’re either in it for the story beats, in which case explore at the easier difficulty at your leisure. Or you’re in it for the scoring challenge, in which case just go ahead and jump into the almost aptly named “impossible” level.

This is where Rebuild is one of the best zombie games I’ve ever played. It’s bleak, difficult, and most often ends in failure. It’s about desperately needing to do three things but only having the resources to do two of them. It includes suicide, starvation, disease, lawlessness. Even the dog can die. Looming over it all is a sense of impending doom as the zombie attacks get bigger and more frequent. Over time your survivors form a band of combat hardened bad-asses. If you didn’t give them names when you recruited them, you’re going to learn their names or change them once they’ve survived a while (Rebuild will even give some characters a nickname based on certain injuries). At which point the inevitable losses sting all the more.

Like X-Com, Rebuild is all about getting attached to characters who will likely die. Also like X-Com, it’s about revealing gameplay mechanics as you progress. The banks, science labs, and heliports aren’t just decoration. Just as autopsies in X-Com revealed crucial new parts of the game, so too do sections of the city in Rebuild.

Rebuild is almost single-handedly the creation of indie developer Sarah Northway, who has iterated it from a web game to an iPhone game, enlisting some nifty comic book cutscene art and a darkly unsettling score from talented contributors. It still hangs frequently on my iPhone, but thanks to the autosave, I’ve never lost any progress. Like Pandemic, this is one of those games too good to stay a free web-based Flash game. And like Atom Zombie Smasher, this is an example of how zombie mythology has a lot more to offer videogaming than chainsaws and horde modes.

5 stars
iOS

  • Pogue Mahone

    Wait a minute, I’ve played this before! You mention it was a web game previously, I must have come across it on Kongregate or some other site? Anyway, sounds like they added a bunch of detail and functionality, I’ll certainly drop some cash for this.

  • Jefrazer

    I spent hours playing this on Newgrounds.  Only seems fitting that I plunk down some cash for the iOS version

  • Mini-Cyn

    Your review made me buy this. You, Mr. Chick, have made me spent money. It best not be a waste. ;)

  • Ryan Giles

    My only complaint is the music seems screwed up on my new ipad.  Otherwise I love the game.  I’ve only bought 2 games so far, this and Pandemic.

  • tomchick

    I hate to put it this way, Ryan, but you might be hearing the music exactly as it was intended.  It’s, uh, a bit, well, unique and I couldn’t blame you for thinking it’s broken. :)

  • thebigJ_A

    So it’s like Dead State – Lite, then? Hmm, interesting.

  • http://www.arcadianrhythms.com/ Shaun C. Green

    Fantastic – I loved this last year and it sounds like the new additions add a lot to it. I think I shall shell out for the iOS version! 

  • Saint Erebus

    There’s another fantastic feature that I believe is worth mentioning. The game is neat because it offers multiple methods of success, but the one primary one that it informs you of is to take over a certain amount of the city, and then find and take city hall so that you can write your own constitution and restart civilization.

    I just discovered that if I choose to keep playing the game after having won through that route, I have the option of sending 5 survivors out to try to restart another city. Which basically means I can start a new game, while keeping 5 of my best survivors, the ones I’m most attached to. Terri Rogers, my master diplomat, and ace shot “Storm Cook,” and my primary fort guard Malcolm “Piledriver” Wolf, and she who slips through shadows like darkened silk, Bambi Magee.

    Oh Bambi.

    This game just skyrocketed even higher in my estimation. Having the ability to port over characters from one game to the next is a feature guaranteed to tickle me.

  • Andrew

    This is also available on Android.

  • Sky

    Thanks!