Preview of the friv game Endzone - A World Apart

In spite of the old Geiger counter crackling and suspicious rusty clouds, we dared to get out to the surface to understand the new work of Friv2Online Games Studio - survival-strategy Endzone. We tell you more about it in the preview.

 

More than a hundred years have passed since the last humans took refuge from the outside world in the bowels of the planet. We were born and raised under the weighty vaults of hermetically sealed bunkers, drawing knowledge from databases and maps, and stirring our imaginations listening to the tales of our elders.

We became a symbol of hope, on whose pale shoulders we were entrusted with the special mission of bringing humanity back to earth. But not even in our wildest dreams could we have imagined what it would be like to feel the touch of the sun, breathe the breeze from a mushroom forest, or hear the rain play on the surface of lakes.

We are mindful of our heritage and do not hold out hope that the surface will shelter us as it once did our ancestors. But we will do our best to make it a home for future generations so that our children will accept its gifts with responsibility and gratitude.

 

The work of Gentleman Studios largely repeats the mechanics of the well-known Banished, but the setting in Endzone is so far from the Middle Ages that the parallels are not too sure, and the developers added something from themselves.

Young representatives of mankind - youngsters and children - get to the surface in small groups, cluster around an old bus and start painstakingly exploring the surroundings. As in Banished, the priority task is to settle, reproduce and survive.

The work on the friv game is active, but there is still a lot under the cover of the process. The last major innovation is the scenarios, which, as opposed to the classic sandbox, fill the game with some plot and additional tasks.

 

Players can still customize maps, but are forced to follow set goals, like reaching a certain population number or lasting a certain amount of time on increasing difficulty. The system rewards users with medals for successful completion.

Locations are randomly generated, but there are not many objects - forests, hills, water bodies, abandoned buildings. The landscape as a whole is not too diverse, but you can adjust the weather conditions or the degree of pollution, as well as modifiers responsible for food consumption or wear and tear of things.

Despite the post-apocalyptic realities, the players' problems will remain the same. First of all - resource management, then - space optimization and finally - meeting the needs of new settlers.

 

The essentials are water and food, and the diet must be varied. To collect water, the friv game provides bridges near lakes, from which water carriers draw water with buckets the old-fashioned way. Wells and rain collectors allow you to relieve the workers, and water will have to be stored in cisterns and water towers, where you can later equip carbon filters for its purification.

For food, hunters, gatherers and fishermen are responsible, as well as farmers who watch over the crops in the fields and plantations where fruit trees are grown for the future. If everyone does their job well, your settlers will be able to enjoy fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, berries and mushrooms all year round.

The main enemy of the food miner is drought. Players have access to a calendar for the next few years (game day counts as a year), which will predict its approach. Heat can seriously affect the soil, irrigators will have to be installed, and herbalists will have to move to other parts of the forest.

 

You can, of course, hope for rain, but in the new world rain showers are rarely greeted with a smile - polluted clouds pour toxic moisture over the heads of settlers, contaminating the soil and lakes with radiation. When the weather is not in the mood at all, the most unpleasant disasters come in the form of sandstorms, which can seriously undermine the health of the locals and damage their buildings.

The settlers use wood and junk to build the simplest buildings. And if the need for the former is covered by foresters - cutting and planting new trees, the junk is depleted and will not be replenished. For more profit, a dump is built near the ruins. The old-timers there extract much more stuff from the same spots that could be quickly and inefficiently scavenged by regular laborers.

In light of the hostile environment, the other three critical resources become tools, radiation protection, and medicine. Recycling points and a sorting center would allow residents to process the collected junk, separating it into plastics, metals, fabric, and electronics.

 

Advanced materials allow tailors to create protective suits and craftsmen to create quality tools. Improved buildings will also require special resources, not to mention social facilities like bars, hospitals or schools for youngsters.

What Banished probably didn't have were solar panels, power lines and batteries to provide settlers with energy. Electricity increases their productivity at night and affects their overall mood - a civilization, after all.

Thanks to the improvised weather station, farmers will learn to resist the vagaries of nature by covering crops in advance, and expedition centers will allow them to send settlers to explore and then to expedition for valuable supplies and new crops.

 

The inhabitants of your town are separated by age. Children study in schools, and in their free time they help carry things to the houses, while the older ones do the rest of the work. Workers are not tied to a particular craft and can switch from one job to another, but they get some kind of achieves for being active in a particular area. The load between the settlers is distributed by the players themselves.

The level of mood and health of the townspeople was not left out. The first, along with education and equipment, affects their productivity, and the second - on population growth. Because of diseases, settlers risk becoming infertile, which will affect the development of your colony not in the most favorable way.

There are only three types of housing in the friv game. Normal and improved houses accommodate the same number of people - two adults with three children, who, when they grow up, are immediately thrown out into the street. The tents are much more crowded, but breeding magic doesn't work there.

 

The picture in Endzone is quite good, especially in rainy evenings, but the engine still needs some work - you can't see yellow grasses and glare on the water on the average PC. But the music, to my taste, doesn't correspond to the game atmosphere - it's a bit too disturbing and dynamic. It feels like a simple routine ambient is asked for the background, we're not playing a war game.

A little bit undercrewed little things, like the behavior of the inhabitants - sometimes they stand, crowd each other, or lay complex curves on the way to the warehouse. Some are frankly lazy, but it's even entertaining. There are enough small bugs, too, and the friv game has a handy tool for catching them to help the developers deal with annoying insects.

The atmosphere in Endzone - A World Apart is not bad, from update to update new structures and mechanics are introduced into the friv game, serious bugs are eliminated and content is expanded.

The friv game has reached a state in which it can be recommended to patient fans of city-building survival games. But for now - more to meditate than to participate in a serious campaign to save humanity.