The zombie apocalypse genre has always been a wildly popular setting for video games. And when tactical combat, crafting, base-building or all of those things are added into the mix, there is the potential for a lot of fun. We recently looked at some pretty good titles that fall into that category. They include Dread Dawn, State of Decay 2, They Are Billions and quite a few others.
Today, we are taking a look at Urban Strife from developer White Pond Games that is being published by MicroProse Software. It’s in Early Access on Steam, with MicroProse saying it expects at least six more months of further development work before everything is finalized. However, Urban Strife is fully playable right now, and it’s pretty polished compared with many titles that struggle with bugs and other Early Access problems. It’s also on sale for $34, so this review will be focused on how everything plays right now, and whether or not it’s worth buying into right away to start enjoying the White Pond Games version of the zombie apocalypse a few months before everyone else. We may go back again and do another review whenever it officially launches.
One thing to know about Urban Strife is that it’s not just about fighting zombies, which separates it from something like Dread Dawn, that we looked at last year or even titles like 7 Days to Die. Yes, the undead play a huge role in it, and the main plot involves trying to get your base defenses beefed up in time before a horde of them come rolling through your nice little town and destroy everything. But beyond just that, there are a lot of other living people in the game world too, including multiple factions as well as independent combatants and even innocent folks. While the zombies are always going to act as a hostile bunch of enemies that populate nearly every part of the map, most of the other groups can become friends or enemies depending on how you play and what story choices you make. The zombies certainly make for challenging opponents, especially when they wander around in large groups, but the living human enemies are a lot smarter, more tactical and generally have much better firepower.
There is even a surprisingly interesting story to tie everything together. You get to create a main character including their name, appearance and clothing, and then assign basic skill points and specialties to get them started. Your main character arrives at the town of Urban, Georgia after being rescued by survivors there following a bad car accident on the overpass outside of town. Your character was apparently fleeing Atlanta in a government convoy when the lead vehicle wrecked. The main character conveniently has partial amnesia so doesn’t know anything about their own history, but medical records found at the crash site indicates that they are immune to the infection that causes zombies. That makes your character invaluable to the Urban survivors as both someone who can safely operate outside of town without getting sick and also as a lab rat whose blood may hold the key to a potential cure or vaccine.
The gameplay in Urban Strife consists of two main levels, the map or strategic view and then the tactical combat that happens whenever you visit a marked location on the map. The strategic view is where you get to see an overview of the various buildings that make up the fortified town of Urban, and where you can make decisions like how to spend your limited resources on things like vegetable gardens, ammunition factories and defenses. You can also manage people on the strategic screen because many of the buildings you develop require people to work at them. And yes, you can collect more resources like construction materials as well as new people during missions out on the main map.
The other main part of the strategic view consists of the world map surrounding Urban. It’s there where you plan missions and send out your character and their squad to complete story objectives like rescuing a VIP or trying to meet and make deals with other factions. You can also go out to scavenge for materials too, which is going to be a critical source of supplies and resources, especially in the early game when you don’t have enough of an infrastructure to feed and protect everyone in town for more than a few days.
A tactical map then launches whenever you visit a named location on the strategic map. That is when your character and their squad are able to walk around and explore the area in real time. However, whenever an enemy spots or detects your team, Urban Strife drops into a turn-based interface where all characters spend action points to continue their movement or attack, and then enemies do the same on their turn. Each side takes turns moving, performing actions and attacking until one group is dead or incapacitated.
In a lot of ways, the tactical gameplay reminded me a lot of Jagged Alliance 3, and that is a very good thing. The combats can be extremely challenging, with human enemies sometimes sniping at you from unexpected positions while undead foes seem to suddenly rush out of the shadows from any alleyways or dark corners that you missed on your first pass through an area. Players also have a lot of options when it comes to combat, including a wide variety of ranged weapons from nail guns you might find at a construction site to semi-automatic shotguns and deadly assault rifles. For melee weapons, there are even more choices like rolling pins, tire irons or just a good old fashion wooden bat. There are also special weapons like Molotov cocktails which are perfect for tightly grouped enemies or those who are, for example, clustered inside a room waiting to ambush you.
Tactically, Urban Strife is really good, and players can come up with lots of great strategies and playstyles. For example, one of the best tactics I employed was to have everyone on my squad crouch down as soon as we entered a new map so we could sneak around slowly and stealthily. It’s a really good idea to, for example, carefully look around corners while hidden a safe distance away, ideally also from behind cover. That way you can see if that lone zombie munching on garbage in the side yard of some house is actually part of a much larger group waiting just around back. Stealth also gives you an advantage over human enemies too. For example, I was often able to clear a house by having people with ranged weapons surround it quietly near the windows to provide intel while my stealthiest person crept around inside and quietly eliminated all of the enemies without alerting their allies. And if things went badly, those positioned at the windows could pop up and help out in a very loud way.
Crafting is also huge in Urban Strife. You can craft or improve just about anything. For example, if you want your rolling pin to pack more of a punch in combat, you can stud it out with a handful of nails. You just need the nails, of course, some kind of a tool like a hammer and a crafting recipe to make that happen. The title is full of crafting recipes right now, and the developers seem to be adding more all the time. Then there is also a higher level crafting that takes place back at your base. With the right base buildings fully upgraded, your survivors can automatically break down materials and then make them into useful things like rifles and machine guns.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Urban Strife is its humor. Each of the characters in your squad and most of the ones out in the world have a backstory that you can learn about, and many of them also act kind of strange or wacky. This is not unlike the mercs in Jagged Alliance, although the ones in Urban Strife seem more realistic. In any case, it was fun taking a group of misfits through the adventure and learning to survive and thrive in the zombie apocalypse.
Right now, Urban Strife is one of the best Early Access games you can buy. It’s very well polished even in its current state, and those looking for a great strategic title with turn-based, tactical combat can have a really good time with it.
New things like more gun calibers are being added all the time, so jumping in now might mean missing out on a few features that will be added later, but that is what second and third playthroughs are for – and Urban Strife seems like a good candidate for that, especially if players really enjoy a setting where zombies and tactical combat so easily mix.