This article is reprinted from the TapTap official account, author: Dark Moon
Infection Free Zone, a zombie apocalyptic management simulation game still in Early Access. After playing the game for more than ten hours, I felt a lot of immaturity from this game, a lot of unpolished details, and a lot of content that can be expected in the future. But I was still playing, so much so that I almost dragged it out so badly.
No way, can you resist the temptation to turn the company building into a doomsday zombie base and dictate to everyone?
I could, because I converted the company next door into a doomsday zombie base, and then watched the company be crowded with zombies and I stopped them all.
Just kidding, I actually made it a shelter
A disaster-themed business simulation game can have a lot of gimmicks, but the freedom to choose a real-life building as the birthplace is definitely the king of the gimmicks.
In The Infestation Zone, you can choose your spawn point and build a base anywhere on the planet, down to the streets.
Not only can you start a cell war directly based on your current location, but you can even defend your company/alma mater/party building, and silently guard the nearby public toilets.
You know, with the real world as the foundation, the playability and the general map are not the same level at all, not to mention anything else. Let's give you a feel for these places first:
Shangqiu Ancient City:
Binzhou River Bridge:
Sun Moon Bay, Hainan Wanhui:
Countless netizens have been gearing up for a long time to try the level of resistance to zombies in this terrain near their homes.
But if you do, you're fooled.
After choosing a specific area, you also need to choose a specific building in this area to use as your starting base, and here, the awkward thing arises.
Take my first archive as an example:
At that time, my idea was very simple: to survive in China, it must be close to large shopping malls, so that there are a lot of materials, and when there is no car in the early stage, I can quickly collect more materials, so the nearest shopping mall near my home must be Jing'an Darong City!
What about my big Rong City? Such a big big Rong City, why is it also a landmark, why is it gone?
That's the biggest pitfall of No Infected Zone: the data source.
In fact, Jutsu Games, the developer of No Infected Zone, has been using OSP (Open Street Map) reality data to obtain realistic maps since their previous titles, 911 Operator and 112 Operator.
OSP, as a free world map that is open and editable to everyone, was once the partner of many professional software. It is a map software that the more people use it, the more detailed the content becomes. But for some well-known reasons, this public editor free map has become a project that requires "magic internet" to access.
Unlike commercial maps such as Google Maps, OSP's data comes from individuals, which leads to the fact that the map version of many regions, especially domestic areas, is too old, which is why I can't find Jing'an Darong City.
But on the other hand, since it's a public editing map, you can't imagine where you're in the neighborhood and there's going to be detailed and up-to-date content.
You can even go to the map and refine the street view and buildings near your home on your own, and wait for the game server to re-crawl the OSP's information.
In fact, many users who have already used OSP will be surprised to find traces of their participation in editing in the game.
Combining these two situations, the domestic region of "No Infected Zone" has subtly become a kind of ecology based on the magic Internet, and the more people around you who are magically connected and involved in editing, the more detailed the map around you will be.
In places where there are too few people involved in editing, even the Great Wall will become a pure highway, such as the biggest victim: the ancient city of Xi'an.
As the inheritance of Chang'an City, Xi'an has the only ring park in China, the Xi'an City Wall, which is supposed to be a geographical location that will make the game an easy start.
What city wall? My wife, my grandfather, and my grandfather built the city wall for me!
However, due to a lack of data, the flawless wall, all of which had only textured outlines, turned into a highway in the game.
On the other hand, the Forbidden City has become an invincible start.
And at Apple's headquarters, which has a large number of people uploading map information, the circular spaceship building can directly overshadow all the ancient cities.
This has to be said to be a pity, and it also makes its gimmick of freely choosing any place in the world to fight zombies lose a lot of color.
Of course, in most cases, it's okay to find a complex that roughly corresponds to your neighborhood.
Since the custom map is fairly reliable, the focus comes to the gameplay.
And as I said at the beginning of the article: "No Infected Zone" is a zombie apocalyptic management simulation game that is still in early access. There are a lot of underpolished details, and a lot of content that can be expected in the future.
There's a lot of practical multi-threading and strategy in the game, and you'll have to distribute your population and equipment according to the way you explore your squad and the different types of work in your base.
It's actually quite fun in the early days, whether it's multiple teams flying kites, or cleaning the map together, as well as protecting the workers and supporting watchtowers, it's some of the more immersive gameplay.
However, the experience of these contents is often affected by bugs and design issues.
As a simple example, if you are stationed in a school and have a team of gunners stationed there, they should theoretically be able to support the entire school.
However, in reality, due to some logical problems with the building generation, they will never get close to the east and west walls of the building, and will also attract zombies to attack because of the hatred brought by the high threat.
Other than that, the tower bugs, the scale of the zombie tide, and all sorts of tiny places are full of roughness and regret that are characteristic of EA stage games.
Even these are just minor issues, and the big ones are in the overall experience of the game:
First of all, the game lacks gameplay objectives.
In the early beta version, China was extremely challenging due to the severe lack of maps and large populations, and this situation has not improved much after changing the material refresh logic.
However, this difficulty is overcome when the player points out the technology of gun making, and at the same time, the motivation to continue playing is overcome.
Yes, now that you can build guns and safely loot and sweep maps, what's next? Rebuild our home?
There is no such content.
An overflowing population, a map-covered shelter, it's a beacon for the rebuilding of human civilization, but neither the Frostpunk ending system nor the regional suppression that ensures that the region is free of corpses.
The bigger problem is the depth of the game's content.
The scope that players can expand is limited to the block they chose at the beginning of the battle, and the maximum is the range of a district in a first- or second-tier city, and when you build them all, there is no room for expansion.
The more embarrassing problem is that "No Infected Zone" is a game with a zombie apocalyptic survival background, which leads to players who do not have industrial production capacity, and most of the time survive by demolishing buildings and other "civilized society whales" content.
In this sprawling settlement, countless alarms and communications crowd up your call channels, as each area is still refreshed with spooky zombies that come from nowhere, turning into a raging horde of corpses that swarm your base, and you may be able to resist their attacks, but despair will eventually engulf the world.
Because the zombie attacks not only work on the shelter, but also on your CPU. The growing hordes of corpses will tear apart your i5 13600KF and force you to give up the game at 100% CPU usage.
Until more gameplay fills the game, the current "No Infected Zone" may only be able to fight zombies in its own community.
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