Endzone: A Predictable Part

"Where did you mess up your fur?
And I don't like your braggartish purr
Your cool cat lazy
Is driving me crazy
And your sweet talk is so amateur"

 

Clare Fader & The Vaudevillains - Catch of the Day

 

 

After the end of the world, 's crap!

 

Before getting back to RPGs I wanted to try some of Frostpunk 2's competition to scratch the city sim itch. But as both my choices proved eerily similar in everything except superficial aesthetic, I may as well finish a full campaign of each and talk about them one after the other. First up we have Endzone: A World Apart.

Welcome to Nyctimus, ca. boom-and-a-half.

Quick, find me a woodcutter's hut. What? Come on, it's so obvious, it's right in front of you! ... somewhere. Among the rest of the junkpile. Though it puts a fair bit of effort into detail work on its various structures, Endzone's first impression is of nonsensical clutter. Maybe intentional to suit its Mad Max aesthetic, but forgetting visuals should also enable the player to identify production facilities and storages at a glance. It's not a unique problem (Dawn of Man had it to a lesser extent) but I've rarely been struck by it quite so forcefully, right from the start and never improving.

 

It similarly lacks flair in other respects, never actively terrible yet never showing any particular competence. I muted its one generic bot-extruded music track after half an hour, and for their sake I hope they didn't pay anyone for voiceovers sounding more wooden than a bot. Not that the flavor texts themselves inspire much thespian passion, sounding more like stage directions (be amazed that people used to eat in fast food restaurants) than anything a post-apocalyptic explorer might say. You can imagine how inspired their political messaging sounds:

I feel insulted to agree with your inanity

The interface tracks the same awkward fumbling, as while you're given access to an overtly comprehensive system of stats on resource trends, it contains almost no relevant information (what's my projected wood production and consumption and how is it distributed, how much housing do I have and need) and resources overlap for critical services and construction, leading to a lot of inexplicably stalled production chains.

In practical terms Endzone is a quite straightforward Banished clone, with some added inspiration from the likes of Frostpunk or Surviving Mars in adding an exploration system to the formula. Even there it fumbles, as conflating the exploration and city map results in impractically long distances for your workers, and when struck by any shortage, your recovery efforts will be nigh-meaningless because your peasants will die en route before delivering the food/water/medicine you need. Farmers starve to death, herbalists die from infections, water carriers of thirst. Endzone's distinguishing conceit is basing most of your economy on a single basic resource called "scrap" which is then turned into construction of four secondary resources. But reminiscent of Tropico 4, resource production and consumption rarely track any rational pattern, creating situations in which the same food output which supported 200 settlers with surplus creates starvation among 150, and the main secondary four constantly over/undershoot their marks.

 

Likely to help with those weird fluctuations you're handed a quest system as crutch. Whenever you fall short of a resource, you're "spontaneously" hit with a related production demand and receive a bonus of same upon completion. Except the quest will often demand you build exactly one more of the relevant production building than you already have, when the real issue is almost always that you lack the workers to fill even your existing capacity. Even their spare tire's flat.

Some other quirks include requiring explorers to have badges for exploration, which they gain (you guessed it) by exploration, thus forcing you to clear the map in a single generation. Map creation doesn't let you pick your starting location, prompting a lot of re-randomizing to get a decent spot near a lake. This being a post-apocalyptic game, global warming is apparently in effect because winter gets replaced with droughts as resource scarcity challenge. But lumping loss of water, herbs and most food sources into a single disaster turns it into an off button for half your economy, basically a "skip a turn" card and I've already voiced my distaste for such mechanics in single-player.

However, Endzone suffers not so much from individual flaws as from mediocrity, an overwhelming feel of inept imitation, a by-the-numbers assemblage of modern city sim elements with none of Banished or Dawn of Man's honest charm to compensate for its lacks. I guess there could be worse village simulators around, but I know with a certainty there are more inspired ones.

 

Next time, a suspiciously similar exercise in mediocrity: Ixion!