Survival games offer a lot of potential when it comes to playtime and entertainment, especially if we add zombies to this mix. But as this is a widely popular genre for players, there are many survival simulation games out there. However, today I want to talk about Dawn of Zombies, a survival simulation game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world.
In this world, everything becomes dangerous, even other humans who survived the massive fire in the old world. The new world you live in is called The last territories by those who survived until this day. You have to fight against diseases, radiation, hunger, zombies, mutants, or other humans to survive. Humanity falls – dead rises.
Ps: DoZ got developed by Royal Ark, a small Russian development team.
Watch the trailer:
Last men standing – How is the gameplay
Typical for a survival game, there are a lot of mechanics that need to be taught to a new player, so he can have proper gaming experience. However, the tutorial isn’t very long, so the player gets introduced to more and more mechanics overtime when he unlocks new areas or tools.
After we’re finished with the small introduction, it is already time for our first mission. We have to run to another settlement to save other people’s life. However, there is not a happy ending for everyone.
For the most time, you will follow the story mode, which contains hundreds of quests and notes and brings you to many new areas of the game consistently. You will also meet many new characters, that will guide you throughout the story.
To get to the map to visit other settlements and regions, we have to run into the fog, which surrounds our shelter. There are two ways on how you can get to another area, eighter by running or by walking. Running is way faster than walking, but it costs you energy that you need to regain by eating food or staying near your shelter. When we don’t have enough energy, we can still walk home, but we have to wait quite some time until our character arrives.
Dawn of Zombies focuses massively on looting areas to gain proper equipment or slaying zombies to get their loot. On each mission we take or region we visit, we can find different loot (in different tiers) that we can bring home. Unfortunately, we only have a small inventory, so we cant carry a lot of items.
Note: If there are Zombies or other enemies nearby when you start looting something, they will come after you. So clear the area first!
This is also the point where you have to craft new parts to carry more items (bags). Also, by collecting enough resources, we can craft items that enable us to open things that we couldn’t open without the right tool. For example, to open wooden doors or wardrobes, we need to craft an ax.
When you come back to the shelter, I highly recommend to craft some chests to store your loot and gear, as collecting resources and upgrading your equipment is your main task, besides taking on missions from other NPCs. By slaying mutants or zombies, you will level up too, which unlocks better gear, that you can craft.
In DoZ, we can unlock different tiers of loot, by reaching specific levels (happens at level 32 the first time). After reaching these levels, boxes that we looted before now contain some additional equipment on a higher tier (and the higher the tier of the item, the better!)
To make things a bit more comfortable, the developers added an “auto” function. By enabling the auto mode, our character starts collecting items by himself, and even fights upcoming enemies automatically. But I wouldn’t recommend going away from your phone as you need to eat food and drink water regularly. If you don’t do that, your character will starve to death, and you will lose all your items.
Speaking of which, every time you use one of your tools or weapons, it will lose durability. If a tool only has a bit durability left, you can eighter destroy it, or put it in a chest to repair it later. When we go through quests, we can get much better gear that you definitely should put into a crate, as they are more effective and rare than regular items.
Note: We can find and unlock over 60+ different weapons like an AK, M-16, Makarov pistol, or Mosin-Nagant.
Over time, when we increase our player level and get better gear, quests become more difficult. Overall, the game has an excellent way on how it challenges us, so it doesn’t get boring at all.
The warehouse is probably the most challenging type of content we can regularly challenge, as we have to face a lot of strong monsters, to get some loot. In addition to a large number of undead zombies, bosses will appear too!
When I saw this game on the app store, I didn’t expect it to be very challenging. However, after dying several times and losing my items forever on a quest, I have to say it is not an easy game. But I had a lot of fun while playing.
Also, I was a bit scared that the controls are not well-made, but luckily they are well-made. Controlling our character is very easy, and managing our inventory works excellent (better gear can unlock additional inventory slots as well).
Visuals and effects – How does the game look?
So, the gameplay is good, but how are the visuals of the game? Well, DoZ doesn’t look as good as other games from big companies, like Brawl Stars, but it still looks decently good. The characters and the different menus look good and clean, and the details make everything much better.
When we unlock the basement of our shelter or just go to other areas of the map, we can see that they added a lot of smaller things to make everything look nice. In buildings, we can find couches, paintings, used pans, dead bodies, and much more.
I really like the crafting menu is this game, as it has simple navigation, and we instantly see what resources we need to craft an item (and where we can find them). Most of the animations we can see also look very good, and have no issues as far as I can say.
But I wish that we could open the mini-map, so we can get an overview of the whole area we’re currently at.
In-game monetization:
There are a lot of opportunities to spend money on Dawn of Zombies. If we go to the shop, we can choose packages from eight different categories: offers, best, limited, arsenal, repairing, transport, resources, and gold. In each of these categories, we can choose from multiple packages with different additions.
Note: Gold is the main currency of the game and can be used to restore energy or to buy equipment.
Prizes vary widely between the categories, but I saw packages ranging from around 1,50€ up to 30€. But luckily, having a lot of options doesn’t necessarily mean that everything costs a lot of money. The prices in DoZ are reasonable, so it doesn’t hurt our pockets too much.
What needs to be improved?
Dawn of Zombies does many things right, but it is still not perfect. During my playtime, I encountered some issues that I want to share with you now: The first thing that I think needs a bit of improvement are the loading times. Whenever I start the game, I have to wait about one or two minutes until I can move around and play the game. Luckily, in-game loading times are quite low.
Another thing that I personally don’t really like about the game is the quality of loot we get through looting areas. To the point where I got a decent weapon, it took multiple hours of playtime. The first weapons that we can craft are not that good, and some of them need resources that take a while to get. But besides these two points, I have nothing more to complain about.
Last things to mention:
Dawn of Zombies is one of the best survival simulation games that I’ve played so far in my gaming career. We can loot, build bases, craft items, collect gear, slay more zombies, and take on events I would say that we have to spend a lot of time in this game, to come to a point where it gets boring.
I also watched some gameplay videos about DoZ, and I can say that it is still challenging even with decent equipment. In addition to that, we can look forward to new content, like a clan system, bigger settlements, multiplayer PvP, boss raids, and more.
| ?? Pros of Dawn of Zombies: | ?? Cons of Dawn of Zombies: |
| Crafting system | Long loading screen while starting the game |
| Online multiplayer | Gear breaks very quickly |
| Many quests | |
| Challenging | |
| Good visuals | |
| Decent controls and navigation |
