Dead Season review

Dead Season is a new turn-based tactics game from Snail Bite with a few interesting takes on established ideas. Before you get too excited, though, remember that interesting doesn’t automatically mean “good”. Having your leg gnawed off by a Rottweiler certainly wouldn’t be an uninteresting event, but it’s hardly a Dear Diary moment either.

You see, Dead Season is an XCOM-like with zombies in it, and it really boggles the mind that it hasn’t been done before with the Walking Dead licence slapped on it. You take control of four survivors: Holly, Matt, Travis, and Paige, and must guide them through various scenarios that are teeming with the Dead.

Immediately, Dead Season feels like a game full of ideas. Thought has been put into making it feel more like a zombie game than a tactical shooter, so it’s much more than just a pallet-swapped XCOM clone. Not all of the ideas land fully, though. For example, the chance-to-hit mechanic rears its godforsaken head once again, this time represented as the chance to critically damage a shambler. As the zombies are already dead, they’re difficult to put down for good. This tracks as a concept. However, it still just comes off as you whiffing a melee swing on a zombie that isn’t moving. Had each blow hit and the chance been presented as high or low damage it would have achieved the same, but without the psychological kick in the balls every time one of your idiot characters fails to hit a stationary object with a crowbar.

Ranged damage suffers from a similar mechanic but that makes more sense as, besides Holly, you’re not trained marksmen. Holly is a cop, and therefore should miss way less than the others. Either way, Dead Season compensates for your potential competence by doubling down with a chance for every gun to jam roughly a quarter of the time. It still costs Action Points, and also requires a further Action Point to repair it. This is what the Ancient Ones referred to as “absolute bullshit”.

What it does is add to the sense of desperation. Your survivors aren’t hardy, so you need to scavenge gear to improve survivability, and level up their innate skills such as reducing the chance of a gun jam, or allowing them to carry unused action points forward. They all have the same fairly limited skill tree, though, so there’s not much variety involved.

To perpetuate the sense that the story continues between each mission, Dead Season will also arbitrarily remove items from your inventory during the journey. So confidently leaving one mission packing a shotgun and an AK47 is often punished for no good reason. Again, it escalates the aura of desperation and I get why they do it, but it hampers your sense of progression. Each mission you’ll often need to find fresh weapons, and toolkits to barricade doors and defend against the hordes. Special zombies make an appearance of course, with hazmat zombies that will leave poisoned clouds behind or hooded runners that are a straight rip from Left 4 Dead‘s hunters.

Noise is a factor, too. More zombies will climb from sewers or stagger out of doorways each turn no matter what you do, but the more noise you make the more zombies will come. They’ll also become enraged, moving further and attacking with greater precision. Using firearms is the main factor in generating noise, but most missions will contrive ways to make a racket and up the stakes towards the latter third. A zombie will fall off a roof onto a parked car and set off the alarm, for example, or you’ll break into a store for supplies and trigger lights and sirens. Every mission becomes a battle of attrition as you try to move a little at a time, taking out whatever you can with whatever you’ve got. On normal difficulty, it feels almost unfair, as your squishy survivors can’t take many hits before they die.

And when you lose one, you fail the mission. This happened to me right at the end of one mission that had taken me close to half an hour, whereupon I learned that there’s no autosave. You can save and load at will, but the game doesn’t do it for you. If you forget to save and then die, you need to go all the way back and start again. That one was hard to recover from.

I enjoyed my time with Dead Season to an extent but it’s not an experience I’d wish to repeat. The lack of real customisation or variety and the way it handles progression between missions let it down for me. The characters are OK, and the story – told mostly through silent still images and the occasional spot of voice work – is about as standard as a zombie story can be.

Dead Season is a decent game for fans of the turn-based genre who like to feel that everything is a little bit hopeless. Adding zombies to the formula doesn’t do much to freshen up the genre, but there are some solid ideas at work even if the execution is a little wobbly at times. Still, if you crave a challenge and can’t get enough of the shambling dead, it’s certainly worth a look.