Infected Free Zone Review

Infection Free Zone is built around one the best ideas for a game I’ve seen. Imagine, if you will, a zombie strategy game where you’re managing survivors, scavenging for materials and food, building walls to keep the hordes out at night, cutting down trees and stripping cars for wood and metal respectively. Now imagine if that game used something like Google Maps to set itself in your actual neighbourhood, on your street, and your base is your actual house. The trees you’re felling? From the nearby park. The guns you pilfered? They’re from the police station down the road. As a long time zombie game aficionado, this is just about the coolest idea I’ve seen for ages.

You begin by putting in your post code, zip code, or whatever is relevant where you live. The game then loads the part of the world for that post code as a pre-sliced chunk of the world to play in. You can’t freely move this tile around, but instead have to make do with wherever on the tile your post code is for your choice of home base, whether that’s right in the middle or on the edge.

You’ll have a squad of people ready to go salvage nearby buildings for food and materials and workers to build and upgrade things. You’ll need to adapt buildings into living quarters, cookhouses, warehouses, and so on rather than building them fresh as actually building needs to be researched first. Nearby hospitals and GPs (as in, the real hospitals and GPs near you) will have medical supplied to scavenge, nearby schools will have research materials, police stations have guns and body armour, and so on. Again, this is really cool.

Naturally, this doesn’t all happen in a vacuum, and as you’re salving your way through your first day night will eventually fall, which is when the hordes come out. All your workers will return home and your squads will be at more risk if you send them out, not to mention your base will be at risk if you do send them out. The hordes will roam the area, likely attacking your base if they get close enough to notice.

The first night is when we encounter our first minor issue. At night, every time so much as a single zombie comes into the view radius of your base, you’ll hear “horde nearby” or words to that effect. Then you’ll hear it again and again, as zombie hordes don’t generally stand still, instead usually moving into and out of the radius repeatedly. So the warning that a horde is nearby will likely be heard every few seconds all night, which is incredibly frustrating. The same happens for groups of raiders, but they’re not as common and don’t move quite so much, so it’s not as annoying.

After a few days of gathering and building you’ll want to start advancing technologically. You begin here unable to do almost anything but salvage, adapt buildings, and make squads. You can’t produce guns, which does make some sense, but you also can’t build a kindergarten until you’ve researched it, which in essence is just a place where you put children.

Welcome to the biggest problem the game has: research. There are three considerations for this. First you need to build a research centre, which is fair enough, but then to actually research anything you not only need to already have amassed enough research points to start researching, but you also have to spend many, many in-game hours doing the research.

The amount of time it takes to research things is what really tarnished my enthusiasm for the game. I’ve been getting alerts about needing guns since the second day of my base, despite having pilfered every police station I could find for weaponry already, but it requires 20 points just to start researching how to make a pistol, then I have to do 82 hours of research with two research centres each with two researchers. Research stops at night, so that’s about six days to unlock the ability to make a pistol. You can speed this up with more and bigger research centres, housing more workers, but it takes too long to start and ignores that these people surely have some innate knowledge of how things used to work.

If you can get used to the research thing, this is honestly a really cool game. Graphically it’s fairly unimpressive and merely functional, even if the recreation of the streets on the map tile is, in my experience, very accurate. That’s not really what’s important, when the actual survival gameplay here is quite good. You can build a huge wall around your neighbourhood to keep the baddies out, with watch towers full of armed defenders, you can find cars that can be repossessed so your squads can get around much quicker and carry far more resources with them, and you can also send your squads on expedition outside of your active map, into the surrounding tiles. You yourself can’t go with them, but they will gather resources and encounter random events off screen, with you making decisions for them via the radio.

The zombie mechanics are quite good too. During the day they tend to hide out in buildings, then come out in numbers at night. If you saw a horde in an area just before daybreak, they’re probably still there in one of the buildings. They can also form lairs in larger buildings, which will fill them with an absurd amount of walkers that must be dealt with or the number of hordes in the area will increase. Then there’s some story stuff that is delivered mostly through radio messages with choices for you to make. It isn’t exactly unique, but it does do more than I expected, especially wwith regards to the zombies.

Outside of all this, the game controls…adequately on console. It’s an on screen mouse cursor that you control with the left stick, which could be better, especially since you need to move it into the corners to access certain menus. It’s a bit fiddly, but it could also be worse.