Dead Season on PC
The perfect month to lean into horror trappings, October has already seen the likes of Silent Hil 2 arrive to bring the spooks and scares. However, there is always room for more, and in Iceberg Interactive and Snail Bite‘s Dead Season, the spookiness is complemented by a layer of tactical turn-based goodness, but may have bitten off more than it can chew.
The easiest way to think of the game would be transplanting the XCOM formula into the world of the living dead. With a team of four survivors trying to carve out a life for themselves in a world gone bad, your decision-making will be the difference between life and a shambling death. That premise in itself seems like an idea with legs, and for the most part, it works.
Depending on the objectives of any given level, guiding your survivors to carry out the mission requirements is complicated by the presence of the walking dead. With limited Action Points, the tension is immediately high in the face of danger. Do you choose to explore more to potentially find useful items, take the initiative and start whacking at the first zombie you see, or do you adopt a more careful approach to keep everyone in the pink of health?
Naturally, there is no running away from combat in Dead Season, and that’s where some of the mechanics can be cumbersome and reflect the difficult balance between keeping things somewhat real while still retaining a sense of fun. Zombies in this world are inherently slow-moving things, so it makes it hard to stomach when a melee attack misses, even if your survivors are not battle-hardened warriors.
Missing at range makes sense, and the noise generated by using a firearm or from environmental interactions is a risk as it can cause nearby enemies to rage if they are not taken out. But the constant jeopardy of guns jamming quite frequently stacks the odds against you even further, wasting your precious Action Points. The end of the world isn’t supposed to be fair, but this feels doubly punishing far too often. Things can be balanced slightly by levelling up and unlocking new skills, and definitely helps in creating a more workable team. While everyone has the same skill tree, how you want to grow them is entirely up to you.
Considering that every step can be fatal, players will need to learn the importance of saving their games manually during a level. The lack of an autosave system, either by design or otherwise, means a mission that takes 30 to 40 minutes can instantly fail should any of your survivors fall, leaving you no choice but to repeat everything from the start.
Even if you find yourself making the perfect run, grabbing all the valuables and completing your objective, Dead Season throws another wrench into the mix by literally taking things out of your hands. Going into a new level may see some of your loot get removed, and usually, they are useful weapons that make a significant difference against the enemies. Instead of facing increasingly impossible odds while growing more capable, the feeling that the world is conspiring against you in this way just doesn’t feel right.
At a glance, there is something there with what Dead Season is trying to achieve. The premise has plenty of meat to offer, but that is contingent on the systems working well together to create real challenges that ultimately feel fair. It need not look or sound the best, but at the very least, it shouldn’t feel this unfair, even if we are facing the apocalypse of the undead horde.
Dead Season is now available on Steam.
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Summary
The undead hordes are upon us yet again in Dead Season, but they are by far not the biggest issues in this turn-based tactical experience.
