Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation is a game that is a colony management game in the same genre as Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld. However, the thing that sets it apart is that it has a built-in narrative (unlike the other two, which have emergent stories from open worlds) and that it is set on a post-demonic apocolyptic Earth. Sounds like it should be pretty decent? Like a survival colony management game version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Well, that's what I was hoping for. Now, for a little disclaimer, I started this game after playing the all-round excellent Rimworld. My first impressions of that game can be found here, and I will hopefully be putting up a more detailed review later (time permitting!). So, it is an incredibly high benchmark to be comparing against!
NOTE: All Screenshots are mine from gameplay.
Judgment (it annoys me endlessly to have to misspell that...) starts you on a small colony with three people (hmmmm... sounds a bit like Rimworld...) at the end of a demon led Apocalypse. The setting is intriguing to say the least, and is a really promising beginning for a survival game. Like I said in the beginning blurb, it really sounds like it is the Buffy game that we've always wanted (well, that I've always wanted...). Combating the forces of evil with technology and the occult whilst maintaining a colony of survivors!
The opening tutorial does set you up pretty well for all the combat and colony building aspects of the game. The exploration part does come later, but you are also walked through your first initial adventures. Thankfully, the tutorial is also pretty short, so there isn't too much blather about things that should be self evident in a good UI design!
The tutorial is presented well, with short term objectives that are described in a story-like form in the Journal. It will later expand to a fuller story arc with longer term objectives, but for now, it is the way the game guides you through the basic mechanics.
This is where you will spend half of the game, in the colony management section. This is an overhead view of your colony and it's immediate surrounds, from which you can not move away from. This is quite in contrast to Rimworld, where you were able (and in fact would probably have to) build new settlements to harvest different resources and access different factions, missions and trades.
Most of the building is quite overly simplified. You are likely to only need one of each major type of production facility and only a handful of the other ones. So far (due to the simplicity of the combat), I've found no need for building cover for my colonists, so that is a bit of a wasted class of buildings as it just doesn't provide enough bonuses to justify it's use of resources. Beds are probably the most useful things to construct as the tiredness modifier is something that needs to be avoided, and having a few means people will just plonk down anywhere there is a free bed (no bed ownership...). Also, it doesn't matter if a bed is right next to the kitchen or by itself or next to a smithing station, there is no modifiers or consequences. Likewise, there isn't any system of ownership of goods or rooms or anything like that. Already, I miss the complexity of Rimworld!
The resources section is also quite simplified, you can often find the goods you need by raiding on the strategic map or by just waiting for them to be harvested (or trade for them with the trade caravans). However, it is necessary to have a few things to be constantly harvested, such as stone and wood. Metal and the later mineral resources are handy, but they are limited on your home tile anyway, so you are more likely to end up trading or raiding for these! Food and Water are the major things that need to be balanced, as you gain more survivors you need more edibles which means more construction of farms and wells in addition to the workers needed to maintain them.
That said, there isn't really a huge complexity in the resource economy here, not in your home colony and not in the interactions with friendly factions. You can affect the order in which your individual colonists choose to do tasks, so you prioritise the ones that each individual is best at, but apart from that it isn't much more than allocating and waiting.
There are five research trees, of which three draw upon "normal" research points and the other two upon "occult" research points. There is a very limited divergence on the trees, and each breakthrough grants you one relatively small bonus (a global bonus, or a new crafting/building blueprint). The research also has various choke-points requiring you to gather a certain critical component (from raids) to progress past the choke-point. It feels a bit heavy handed, and I wonder if it is a way of artificially limiting the number of trees that you pursue to completion?
Any survival/management sim requires a crafting page, and here is this one. Unfortunately, it is pretty bland. Most of the things that you can craft are not very interesting, and often you can buy or raid for better things anyway. Also, there is no difference in qualities of each similar item, and so there is no real reason to use a skilled workman other than the time saving, which is minimal. Later on, a highly skilled crafter might refund the resource costs of the item, but that is pretty underwhelming for the skill investment....
You begin with three colonist survivors, randomly assigned roles and a few basic traits that affect their skill selection and also their preferred jobs. However, they are pretty bland and cookie-cutter like. You don't feel any real attachment to any of them, and it is more annoying to lose one due to the lack of one more set of able hands to keep juggling the time commitments of the tasks. Compare this to RimWorld, where you love and cherish each of your colonists, complete with their individual failings and strengths... and when you lose one, it is real loss that you feel... not annoyance!
The roles (Scout, Priest, Warrior...) determine the skills that your characters can level up in, which means that there is incredibly little diversity in how they grow. They don't get better by doing things... just ding, and up a level. Even still, the bonus by leveling up are relatively minor and not that exciting... at best, they might unlock a combat skill or access to a otherwise locked tier of weapon or armour.
No, you are not going to get emotionally attached to these toons... oh, and by the way, the only way to get more people is by completing randomly generated rescue missions, which may or may not pop up when you need them....
The Strategic Map is littered with one hit raid locations, meaning that you hit them once, and then they disappear forever. You know exactly what you will find there and the enemies that you will face, there is no mystery or danger. You are artificially limited to an initial travelling party of five people (why?), who magically draw their supplies from the base camp's food storage. Again, too much simplicity and abstraction for this sort of game...
On the world map, you can also come across settlements that start off as neutral to you. However, your only interactions with them are to respond to cries of help (positive approval), request a trade caravan, steal (sorry persuade) a member to join your colony (negative approval) or to attack them. Very limited options...
Whilst you are out exploring, you might (rarely, very rarely) encounter some random events. They are completely text based, and basically boil down to making a choice with no idea of any consequences or what goes into making the choice... However, they are a nice addition, but one that could be better implemented.
Also, there are the occasional random missions that pops up which have a bit of a time limit on their completion. The most useful of these is a rescue a survivor mission, which allows you to add an extra survivor to your colony, although the ability assist a neighbouring settlement is a decent way of improving your standing with them (before you pinch one of their survivors...).
Okay... let's get this part out of the way. This section of the game is quite terrible. The map is grid based, with some cover and melee/ranged modifiers for accuracy and damage. However, the characters move so slowly that it is best to be in place and not be the one that is caught moving when the battle is joined, otherwise the enemy will get a few free hits in whilst your characters are just walking slowly to their assigned spot.
In the end, there really is not tactical depth to this. You set up shop on an edge of a patrol, and you kite some monsters to the killing field. Rinse and repeat until you are the last ones standing. One particularly annnoying thing is that there is no chance to revive downed characters, so if they go down, they are out for good. This has the effect of the combat being an all or nothing encounter, if it starts to go bad, you are screwed. Otherwise, you will win with no casualties...
Now for every encounter, you do have the option for just sneaking around and snatching the loot and running. However, due to the tactical map being so small, you will have a patrol run across you anyway, and so you will have to stop looting (or fight with one character out of the fight) and fight anyway! Plus, you will miss out on the loot from the dead monsters, so there is really no incentive to NOT fight.
Unlike other games of this genre, there is a fairly tightly controlled storyline here. Which is good, seeing as there is very little in the depth of the open world mechanics to allow any real emergent stories to develop. There is an ongoing quest to pursue the reasons for the demon invasion, and then to perhaps to repel the assault. To be honest, I'm finding this game to be such a chore to play, that I'm really finding it difficult to even have enough curiosity to complete the story. However, I'm slowly slogging away at it....
There are also random short story events, such as when one of my characters started being obsessed with wolves and the moon, or this favourite one of mine where I was attacked by flying pumpkins. However, the resolution of these events are generally "kill something" or "craft something"...
There is a pretty low res but distinctive art style to this game which I quite like the look of, and as a special bonus, this means that it runs easily on pretty everything that is a step up from a potato. So performance and visuals are pretty decent.
However, I found the audio was a let down. It is a pretty repetitive game and the audio is just sounds that reflect the daily life of what your characters are doing on the screen at the moment. Chopping trees, killing demons and digging up stuff... Not that interesting. Likewise, I found that the music wasn't really that engaging either, so I ended up playing the game with the sound off for most of the time.
I'm afraid that this game held so much potential in it's setting and it's premise of surviving in a demon infested Apocalypse. The art style was distinctive and interesting, and the narrative concept was decent. Unfortunately, the poor and clunky gameplay (both combat and on the strategic layer) brought the entire thing down. There was very little required in the way of tactics that could really heavily affect the outcome, which led to fights being boring and repetitive and the RPG aspect of the characters was just too limited. Resource management was also a bit of a bore and more of an exercise in time keeping, in the end I found the game to basic in mechanics and just a big let down after the complexity and the joy of playing RimWorld.
So, a game where the player hits a point where it becomes a bit of a chore to play... perhaps Buffy can sum it up better than I can...
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