Sometimes you forget to build a graveyard. It happens. When ten citizens died on the roads of one of my settlements in Endzone 2, a post-apocalyptic city-building game, I had to act quickly to prevent a disease from breaking out. But graveyards take up a lot of space, and if you’ve already filled your shantytown with a sea of corrugated iron roofs, that’s a problem. Welcome to the enjoyable puzzle of urban planning in a post-nuclear world, where most of the land is brown and uninhabitable.
Endzone 2 delivers on many of the expectations of a building game, even if it does offer a small side activity of CRPG-style scene exploration (more on that later). You play as a band of underground survivors repopulating the surface. But the resentful land dictates your use of space, with little red squares of swamp, mountain, lake, or wasteland refusing to conform to your desire for more housing, or a market in the otherwise perfect location. The resulting cities often feel organic and real, rather than the endless rows of apartments or perfectly round suburbs that might be allowed in other building games.
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There are many types of buildings to build and many workers to assign. Small invisible fishermen will increase your food supply, small invisible weavers will increase your cloth stack. Many buildings get bonuses when they are near other buildings of a certain type. A coal kiln near a lumberjack's hut, for example. A warehouse near… uh, anything. But because you're sometimes forced to clumsily squeeze things together, you'll often have to abandon any hope of perfect output. That, I think, is the silent appeal of the game. It's about efficiency, sure, about clicking buttons on a machine back and forth. But it's a machine that doesn't want to accommodate you all the time. It says, “Look, this is how it's done in the deadlands, deal with it.”
There are moments of seasonal peril that force you to stockpile goods for a rainy day. A drought causes the lakes to disappear completely and your water supplies to dwindle rapidly. A toxic rain requires protective clothing or radiation sickness will strike your frontier dwellers. The game falls squarely into the ant-versus-grasshopper school of building games, where the tension comes from the desire to expand while amassing bags of food for successive crises (hello Banished, hello Northgard, hello Timberborn). So there is a certain level of constant threat. But aside from that tension, I found the whole thing oddly relaxing.
Maybe it’s because you can leave the workshops and go on a journey at any time. A toy truck provides Endzone 2 with a scavenging adventure. You guide the truck along the cracked roads of the wasteland future, plundering various ruins for additional resources. Some locations allow your drivers to exit the vehicle and explore the surroundings, interacting with objects in an isometric perspective in an almost CRPG style. Find an axe and force open a few doors. Discover a book that will help you identify plants, unlocking new seeds to grow. Blow open a shipping container and collect all the iron ingots inside, like a child in an irradiated yellow raincoat opening a long-lost Kinder egg.
This is also how you progress through the game's research tree. By exploring these town sites and roadside dumps (sometimes quite far from your settlement), you earn “knowledge points” that allow you to progress through a traditional tech tree of mines, water treatment plants, bathhouses, crematoria, not to mention the many improved versions of the same buildings you already own.
It’s a nice distraction, and tying it to the research tree makes it feel like something worth indulging in every now and then. That said, Endzone 2 is first and foremost a game about checking the green arrows and dispelling the red arrows with judicious gauge adjustments and spur-of-the-moment building projects. That becomes apparent once you’re using that same little exploration truck to establish entirely new settlements on the same large map, at which point the plate rotation begins in earnest.
Each small patch of green, habitable land you discover will have distinct strengths and weaknesses. One settlement might benefit from plenty of fresh water from numerous lakes, ideal for supporting a thriving textile industry. Another might be located in a swamp, well-suited to making medicinal herbs. Another might boast an iron ore vein to mine, or an iodine mine. Since each village on your expanded map will specialize in these specific products, you will then need to set up transport links, again using the travel vans as small trucks, traveling back and forth between your towns with their boots full of syringes, rubber gloves, clay bricks, or gas masks.
Over time, a small network of goods begins to form. Interdependent production chains appear, and you can start trying to optimize things. Workshops will produce tools faster if there is a scrapyard and a lumberjack shack nearby to provide the materials, and fisheries will harvest more seafood when those tool-making workshops are located nearby. This is a fairly standard base-building process of creating multiple cities with intersecting logistical needs. The challenge is to place these buildings when the terrain doesn't allow for perfect efficiency, or when the random decisions you've made previously have created a sprawl that makes placing new buildings a puzzle in its own right. need a cemetery?
When a sudden drought or plague hits the landscape and threatens the stability of your provincial havens, you end up altering these import-export routes in micromanaged ways, trying to ensure that Grimdork Lakes gets enough medicine from other cities, or that plenty of water is delivered to Garbageville (yes, you can rename your settlements). When toxic storms hit, a little Geiger counter indicates how much radiation your settlers are exposed to. And you also have to keep an eye on the soil, as it too can be poisoned by radiation.
If the Geiger sound doesn’t bother you, the wonky voice acting might. The music also seems very reserved. The synthwave soundtrack, while not unpleasant in itself, doesn’t mesh well with the art style or subject matter. It’s the kind of music you hear in sci-fi space games, an almost robotic beat that might be fine if this were a base-building game set in a glittering cyberpunk ruined city. But against the bucolic backdrops and overgrown country houses, it creates a strange ambient clash. I turned the music down to 0% and put on a “chilling guitar” playlist instead. It works a little better.
I have other reservations. For a game that's all about efficiency and production lines, there's sometimes unnecessary friction. The long loading times when resuming your save file should hopefully go away in Early Access. As for the rest, I don't know. A pharmacist and a pharmacy are two different buildings you can create, for example – one to make medicine and one to distribute it. Not only are the similar names confusing, but it also seems excessive in a society that has to save money by nature. Can't a single building do both?
There are other constraints. For example, since each colony has its own resource pool, you have to hop from city to city, opening each one's research tree before you find the colony with enough iron or glass or whatever to hit the “research” button for a particular technology. It also means that sometimes you have to get a meager handful of clay, medicine, or clothing to where it's needed, just to hit a button, while your logistics brain is busy screaming “I already have everything I need!”
Typically, this is why research and skill trees in games often run on their own separate currency—it keeps them safe from issues like this. But Endzone 2’s research tree requires not only knowledge points, but also material goods. That makes it more ingrained in your production and transportation network, sure, but it also makes for some unintuitive moments at times. It’s a slow game at times, even on its fastest setting.
For those who prefer their logistical manipulations to be more abstract and neat, this game won't take you away from the factory lines of Shapez 2. But it might be worth a shot for those who prefer their number-crunching wrapped in a thematic goal. It doesn't have the moral compass or defined flavor of Frostpunk (which, for me, remains the most engaging post-apocalyptic city-building game). But it does enough with its humble scavengers and scavenging expeditions to at least get you invested in the population as a whole. Even if that concern is still tied to a selfish desire to avoid resource depletion.
“Oh no, the people of Bogbottom are being hit by acid rain again,” you might say. “That’s going to slow down vaccine production.” Better start digging now, those bodies won’t bury themselves.