Forsaken Fortress Strategy Preview

Zombies…Check.. Crafting…Check…Survival Elements…Check. That’s right folks, we have ourselves another zombie survival game to add to an ever-growing list. Forsaken Fortress is a mix of group management, strategy game that feels like a combination of Project Zomboid and XCOM. Your purpose in the game is to fight your way through hordes of the undead, build a shelter, and explore what’s left of a war-swept world.

You start off selecting two characters from to being your journey in the zombie apocalypse. Each of them has a unique set of skills and specialities such as faster crafting or scavenging, and some characters are even more skilled at hand to hand combat. Interestingly enough the female characters start with weapons and the male characters start with nothing, this means you have to choose between characters who can run out of ammo or select the male who is better at melee combat. I found that starting out with at least one character with a weapon so that I wasn’t immediately overwhelmed when searching for loot.

Your camp consists of very little other than a small shack and a storage box, and it’s up to you to try and expand your base to create weapon workshops and beds to rest your characters. One of the main reasons you risk your character being killed is that there are many useful items to be scavenged from the city that will help you to create more useful structures aiding you in protection from the elements and the flesh hungry walkers.

The sound effects in Forsaken Fortress are fairly well done, guns sound good and meaty when they’re shot, and cracking a zombie over the head with a nailed baseball bat makes a satisfying crunch, unfortunately the ambient noises will wear you down quickly. It seemed that clearing a town of zombies did very little to stop the game from spamming my ears with the sound of hungry zombies, which was actually very misleading when it came to me trying to seek out and kill all of the zombies in the area. This actually drove me insane because I kept thinking that a zombie was sneaking up on me to kill my characters.

The combat is fairly standard in that you select your party members, set them to combat mode and then let them loose on the ravenous hordes. As you explore parts of the map you eventually recruit the other four available characters which is actually extremely useful when it comes to carry things back to your base, because certain characters can carry very little, while others can carry a surprising amount. The flesh craving zombies aren’t your only obstacle in this post-apocalyptic world, there are also bandits looking to kill your team and steal all your loot.

The game sounds easy enough in the beginning, however the developers throw a curveball at you by having you micromanage your character’s energy and morale. If one of your characters gets hit too many times by a zombie he can actually get depressed and not want to do any construction or may not fight as well.

One of my favourite things about fighting off the hordes of undead and bandits in Forsaken Fortress is that you can pause the game at any time. This allows you to arrange characters to attack certain targets and plan it out so that no one on your side dies.

If you are looking for a zombie survival game with a bit of a unique twist to it I would say Forsaken Fortress Strategy is worth checking out. It has some great sound effects, the combat is very interesting, and micro managing character’s depression, health, and energy make for a challenging experience. The game does need to make some changes towards the zombie sounds when none are near, however overall I had a very good time trying out this alpha.