Dead Season Review

When you think of zombie games, tactical turn-based combat isn’t usually the first genre that comes to mind. However, Developer Snail Bite is giving it a go with its recent new release: Dead Season. The real question here is if this could bring a new form of zombie game out from the grave or if it should have stayed six feet under. 

Dead Season’s plot is pretty standard really: you control a group of survivors who are trying to survive the nightmare of a zombie apocalypse. The game sees your characters travel across the blighted landscape as you search for equipment, survivors, and a safe space to sit out the apocalypse. Honestly, the plot is mostly just window dressing, and the relatively short campaign isn’t going to leave you with any moral quandaries to contemplate. There’s an argument that this isn’t a bad thing because sometimes you just want to kill the undead, not dwell on the inner savagery of the human mind. 

Thankfully, killing zombies is a lot of what you’re going to be doing here. The game plays like most modern turn-based games: your characters have a set amount of action points (AP), allowing characters to move, fight, and search. This is where my first issue with the game arises, as there are just not enough points. For reference: each character has four points at the base, and there are ways to get a few more, but for the most part, you can only use the base number. During my playthrough, I constantly found myself lacking AP to do pretty basic things, and it meant I had to keep waiting until the next turn.

For instance, it takes three AP to fortify a door, but to do so, you need to walk to the door. Once at the door, you need to pull out and equip the tools, which takes a point of AP, then you might need to close the door… which takes a point of AP. It always feels like you don’t quite have enough to manage it properly. Now, I will say that you do get some leniency simply because the zombies are very slow. You can also get a skill that lets you bank unused AP, which you’ll need when the horde reaches you. 

Combat is weird in Dead Season… not bad but weird. As you would imagine you can find a weapon and use it on the map (more on this later). Each character comes equipped with a base shiv that can take out a single zombie. As you move through the level you’ll find everything from guns, melee weapons, and items. You’ll need these as the zombies can kill you pretty quickly, and they constantly spawn. Ideally, you want to use firearms, but Dead Season introduces a noise mechanic. The more noise you make, the more chance the zombies will rage, which makes them faster and more violent. So, while using a gun is safer in the short run, melee will keep you alive for longer.

Now, I mentioned finding weapons on the map, which can be fun, but it also reveals one of the worst parts of the game. You see, when travelling between maps, there is a chance that the found weapons will break… and they nearly always do. There is a level-up mechanic that helps, but it takes a while to see any improvements. The combat is also pretty repetitive for the majority of the game, with the only difference between most of the zombies being the amount of health they have. The same can be said for the campaign in general, as a lot of the missions feel the same after a while.

Dead Season is visually fine if a little dark and grey in places, but the sound design is grating. The noises the zombies make start as fun, but they get tedious, and the constant random screams and noises just sound dumb. The music is fine, but it's barely there and feels generic. 

You might think that I hate the game, but I don’t. There are plenty of issues and frustrations, but it can be fun when you get it all to run well. When you manage to navigate into a building, create a chokepoint, and hold off the horde, it feels great. However, when you’ve done it 15 other times, it loses some of that charm. This is where the biggest issue with Dead Season comes in: it doesn’t do enough to set itself apart. The reality is that we’re not short of zombie games at the moment. If you want to kill some hordes and miss playing XCOM: Enemy Within then you might have fun here, but there are plenty of other games that can scratch that itch.