Dead Season aspires to turn-based tactics games like XCOM but its missteps leave it as a shambler rather than a sprinter.
It’s no secret that I like games in that hard-to-define XCOM genre. Phantom Doctrine, Othercide, and Mutant Year Zero are all very enjoyable twists on that formula that provide something different whilst maintaining that core gameplay style of overarching strategy broken up by tactical combat. Considering how many imitators there are, it surprises me that there really aren’t any games that focus on zombie survival themes. Dead Season tries to rectify that, and whilst it gets some things right, there’s so much untapped potential here.
The premise is, surprisingly, that you are a group of survivors trying to make it through the zombie apocalypse. You four-person team of civilians all have their own motivations of sorts, but the story doesn’t really take centre stage here. There are comic book panel cutscenes setting up some of the missions, but you won’t be getting a The Last of Us style narrative here. Instead, you move from mission to mission, trying to make it to a place of safety whilst keeping your crew alive. You’ll occasionally get to decide which mission to pursue at the expense of others, but it doesn’t really make a significant difference overall. The campaign is fairly linear, with little to handle between missions beyond assigning skill points.
Missions themselves are where the meat of Dead Season is, and they play out on a grid with you ordering your people to move around, attack, and complete objectives. Your goals mostly revolve around finding and then using an item in some capacity, but missions do have their own framing and occasionally different mechanics to keep you on your toes. You’ll fight zombies, scavenge supplies, and manage your resources as best you can.
A somewhat unique resource in Dead Season is that of noise. If you clobber a zombie in the head with a baseball bat it’s fairly quiet, but carve up some corpses with a chainsaw or unleash a barrage of assault rifle fire and you’ll rile up everything in the area. Making too much noise in a single turn enrages the undead, allowing them to move and attack more quickly, which can be very dangerous. You also need to manage noise over the course of multiple turns too, as should you be too noisy too often, far more zombies will spawn in. It’s a neat system that gives you a risk/reward balance for both ranged attacks and close up attacks. Do you get in close but risk attack to keep the noise down, or should you keep your distance at the expense of more undead attention?
There’s a bit of an issue with the melee weapons, as almost all of them function practically identically, with most causing a single point of damage and only accuracy to tell them apart. It’s a shame as there’s scope to have different effects applied depending on the tool. Hammers could stagger, baseball bats could drive enemies back and so forth. Guns are more unique at least. Shotguns have a spread that can hit multiple targets, friend or foe, whilst assault rifles have a low hit chance but fire multiple rounds. You can even apply attachments to give them additional features. It’s a fun system when handling ranged weapons that melee just doesn’t match up to.
Initially, your heroes have basic weapons, with a few shivs and a pistol to go around. You need to find more tools to survive through random loot searches in each mission. This is a good thing, as you can find pretty powerful weapons and items early on if you’re lucky. Sadly, the devs have tried to mitigate this with you randomly losing a number of tools at the start of each mission. This means that you may have been lucky in the previous mission by finding a useful piece of kit, but you could then start the next mission with next to no equipment of use. Yes, there’s a perk you can spend points on to avoid this, but it seems like spending skill points to mitigate for something that shouldn’t really be there to start with. Limit early mission loot to basic equipment, introducing the stronger stuff as the game goes on rather than having everything available from the off only to have to limit it over time.
The odd choices don’t stop there, sadly. AcYou only get four action points each turn, with moving a single orthogonal tile taking up a point. The result of this is you having turn after turn of just moving a few tiles before watching the zombies all shuffle around, which takes considerably longer than your own turn. Rounds can feel like a slog as you gradually eke your way towards an objective, killing zombies that get close before moving another tile or two. The pace ends up as slow as the undead you’re facing.
Speaking of those undead, there end up being a lot of them. After each of your turns a couple more spawn in, unless you made a lot of noise in the last few rounds in which case lots more spawn in. You have to balance moving forward and killing zombies so you’re still progressing but don’t get swamped, which is another nice balancing act to consider. The issue that comes up though is that as soon as a mission begins, all of the zombies know where you are and make a bee-line for you. There’s no option for stealth thanks to you being chased down constantly, and no option for clever manoeuvring due to the lack of action points, so really you just end up wading through zombies, hoping you manage to make those kills that count.
The thing is though, when things actually do pan out, it’s really satisfying. You let off a burst from an assault rifle and are lucky enough to land three hits to kill a special infected, whilst another character connects with a baseball bat to clear the way for a third who moves into a building, loots a shelf, and finds that key item you wanted. It comes down to luck, but it feels great when it pays off. I wish these moments were more frequent as they’re great when they happen.
Dead Season has a nice enough presentation too. The visuals are functional but convey that zombie apocalypse vibe well even if the environments are quite cliche at this point. Sound is fine at best I’d say. There’s limited music, which I appreciated from an atmosphere standpoint, and the weapons sound powerful enough, but the ambient sound is all over the place. You’ll get random helicopter noises and screams from time to time, which is fine, but they’re the same sound effect every time meaning any impact they could have had is lost the second time they happen. The rare voice lines are a mixed bag too. I get that this isn’t a big budget game, but I’d rather you have no voice acting at all rather than occasional shoddy sound clips.
Coming back to the potential I mentioned before, I can really see something like Dead Season working well if there was more of a lean towards the world and survival elements. Something like this but done in the style of Mutant Year Zero could be really enjoyable. Nodes on a map, but with each one being a sizable open zone that you explore in real time until you reach an area with zombies when you switch to turn based and try to take them out without alerting all the others. I know it isn’t fair to complain about what a game isn’t, but I just feel like there’s so much that could be done with the basics that Dead Season has in place. I hope to see the devs build on what they have here in the future. For now, this is a hard one to recommend unless you’re desperate for a zombie-themed XCOM-like.
Dead Season is available now on PC.
