Survive the Zombie Apocalypse One Turn at a Time in Dead Age
I’m happy to tell you a little bit more about our title Dead Age for Xbox One, a game that we worked on the last couple of years and that we are very proud of.
Dead Age is an innovative mix of survival, RPG, and a roguelike. The entire planet got infested during a Zombie Apocalypse. Similar to “The Walking Dead” this world is in ruins and it is now up to you to make the important decisions, how to find other survivors, which of them you want to save, and how to manage it all in your camp.
Your goal is to survive for 40 days. You will have to take care of your resources and every survivor needs food. They can be assigned jobs to craft armor and weapons and especially important: ammunition. Later, you will have to defend your base against hordes of zombies, raids of plunderers, and groups of aggressive punks.
The combat system was inspired by Final Fantasy 10. It’s turn-based, relatively fast-paced, easy to learn, making it accessible also for casual gamers. Yet the different types of zombies and human enemies have varying strengths and weaknesses. That makes it not effective to use just one strategy for all of them but rather to find a good balance of several skills. You can join the fight with up to 3 members in your party.
For example, you can use Molotov cocktails against enemies with high armor, lay traps which can strike quite heavily and you should use your ranged weapons. They deal a whole bunch of damage, especially when using enhanced ammunition.
As the days pass, new events await you and you need to solve different quests. We tried to make sure that you have enough room for your own decisions but it can happen that your actions will upset some of your people and they won’t be available for adventuring during the next days. Sometimes you should be careful to attend a quest in time as survivors won’t be able to keep waiting for their rescue for too long.
Partially the quests that occur are randomized. This and other roguelike elements (comparable to FTL with permadeath) don’t just give this game more variety but also the possibility to replay it and experience new things while persistent upgrades make your main character more powerful. Different survivors will appear in your camp bringing different quests to play through and maybe you want to take different choices than last time.
Exploring the environment was kept a bit more abstract. You enter new areas, find new resources and many times you will encounter random events that give you another decision to make. If you, for example, want to loot an old bus you might get attacked by enemies. Do you want to bribe soldiers to make them let you pass and escape the zombies? Choose wisely.
Dead Age is now available on Xbox One. I hope you have as much fun with it as we did during development.