‘Dead Season’, brought to you by solo-developers ‘Snail Bite’ and ‘Iceberg Interactive’, is an old-school turn-based zombie game that will have you on the edge of your seat as you use your strategic skills to make it through the endless hordes of zombies. Guide a group of strangers through each level, utilizing various weapons and abilities to make it to the other side while evading the zombie onslaught.

Follow four thrown-together survivors, Paige, Travis, Matt, and Holly, as they embark on a perilous adventure scavenging for weapons and resources in a zombie-infested world once thriving with life, unique challenges and objectives await you on a 16-mission journey accompanied by motion comics and immersive sounds. While the sounds are very immersive and the motion comics are pretty good, I wish the story had more substance at the beginning instead of four random strangers thrown together and teaming up.

Mechanics and controls are simple allowing you to leap straight into the action. Upon selecting which character, you wish to move you are greeted with a set amount of squares you can move to by using LMB. You can also attack or shoot enemies, provided they are within range, which is shown with a white circle, by using RMB. However, be mindful that you only have four action points, which can be used for movement, searching for items, attacking enemies, or other actions, such as reloading a gun.

There are three main items in the game which include items with active abilities, passive abilities, and quest items. Items with active abilities, such as medkits or weapons, show how many action points it takes to use them. Passive items are automatic and do not require direct use and don’t affect your action points. The ‘infected’ are difficult to kill, when using weapons there is a percentage above their heads that indicates the hit chance which is how likely you are to damage vital organs.

Zombies are attracted to noise, thus staying as silent as possible will avoid attracting more enemies. The noise meter keeps track of this by showing a red bar, a blue bar, and skulls underneath. Filling this red bar will enrage the zombies and make them faster for one turn. Filling the blue bar will add an extra zombie at the end of the turn, and the skulls underneath show how many infected will appear at the end of the turn.

The enemies were a little easy to kill depending on if they were within range but did feel very satisfying, it did get a little stale after a while though as the missions take a while to complete. There are perks, such as one that allows you to carry an unused action point over to the next turn, for each character that you can unlock at the end of each turn, but you only get one point so choose wisely. I wish there were a multiplayer mode that could add a certain level of difficulty or fun to each level, I often found it getting stale at certain points as missions took me a bit to complete.

Graphics are neato for a turn-based strategy game, with its dark environment the scenery is very well put together. Dull, dark, and misty scenes give a spooky vibe further enhancing the zombie apocalypse feel of the game. However, some vibrant colours burst through when faced with certain bio-hazard zombies, acid-spitting zombies, or inside certain buildings.

Sounds are a notable mention. The zombies dragging their feet and the crisp gunshot sounds are well done. Accompanying this is a dark and gloomy soundtrack that complements the visuals and overall feel of the game quite nicely.

Overall, Dead Season is well done for a solo developer. Easy controls, superb sounds, and clean simple graphics all work together to give you an eerie zombie apocalypse feel. Apart from this, I do feel as if the missions themselves were lacking a bit more content to keep the player intrigued like some mini-games, explosives, or simply just extra things to interact with. However, I believe Dead Season is a good game for players who like the turn-based genre and is worth giving a shot.

Written by: Larry