2019 is the year of the zombie. Resident Evil 2 reminded us why we loved them in the first place and Days Gone might well be the biggest game of the year. Meanwhile on mobile, NetEase has released its latest …
2019 is the year of the zombie. Resident Evil 2 reminded us why we loved them in the first place and Days Gone might well be the biggest game of the year. Meanwhile on mobile, NetEase has released its latest game, LifeAfter, a zombie survival game.
You play as a survivor of the apocalypse whose sole objective is to try and forge some kind of existence in this terrible new world. The tutorial teaches you the basics of survival, which involves gathering resources, crafting, and avoiding or fighting zombies. It plays a lot like Ark without the dinosaurs.
Basically, there’s a lot to do in LifeAfter. Sure, plenty of it involves fighting off the hungry undead, but even more of it revolves around avoiding them. That’s where the crafting system comes in. You’ll create your own weapons, tools, bandages, and defensive structures.
You’ll rely on the latter a lot as the game goes on. Your objective is to rebuild humanity, so you’ll need to find shelter, fortify it, and pull together fellow survivors to keep it safe. Well, that and fighting zombies because that’s very fun.
In gameplay terms, LifeAfter is very similar to Rules of Survival in terms of feel. It’s very polished visually, features solid touch controls, and the various menus are as streamlined as possible. In fact, the menus have plenty of visual polish themselves. We appreciated how your character actually whipped out a tablet when you open the crafting menu.
You’ll spend the majority of your time exploring an open world. There are trees to chop down, stones to pick away at, and buildings to scavenge for resources.
Combat is a bit of a mixed bag. There’s a wide variety of weapons to destroy zombies with, including ranged and melee weapons, but it’s all a bit lifeless. We shot many a zombie in the face and barely got a reaction from them. Some even continued to shamble forward a few seconds before they realised they were dead.
The dialogue though, is truly woeful. It’s a shame too because you’ve got options to change the course of various confrontations but the dialogue is so painful that you’ll probably just hammer through it so you don’t have to suffer it.
Overall, we enjoyed our time with LifeAfter. It’s a fun post apocalyptic adventure that streamlines the likes of Ark and Minecraft for mobile. It just needs a little more time in the oven to become a must play. Check it out for yourself on Google Play and the App Store.
